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Beyond Good and Evil


Euphrosyne

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Traitor

 

“If you take a life, do you know what you give?

Odds are you won’t like what it is.”

-Chris Cornell, “You Know My Name”

 

 

We didn’t go very far that night.

 

Captain Quinn – who brusquely introduced himself to me the next morning, then returned to peering at reams and reams of what he offhandedly informed me was “signals intelligence” – had brought us into Mezenti Spaceport on Nar Shaddaa overnight. Aly and Vette wanted to go shopping, and I had to go get myself new clothes, toiletries, and all the other stuff that you never really think about when you make big life-changing decisions. Vette also had a line on the whereabouts of her sister – apparently she’d been enslaved for several years – and wanted to check up with an intelligence broker.

 

Aly, Vette, and I left the ship together without the captain – something about him wanting to take full advantage of the peace and quiet to get work done without Vette constantly bothering him. Aly mentioned offhandedly that he was poring through his files looking for evidence of a Republic spy with whom he had a running feud. “Besides,” she said drily, “I doubt Quinn would use his free time to relax even if I ordered him to.”

 

Unfortunately for us, “relaxation” wasn’t really in the program either. On our way out of the spaceport, we were buttonholed by an Imperial officer with an “urgent request”. Aly looked like she wasn’t interested and didn’t want to bother, but the Imperial was soon joined by an imposing Sith woman whose face, let alone tone, gave the impression that she would brook no argument. So she reluctantly listened to what the two had to say while Vette and I hung back and sort of halfway paid attention.

 

Apparently, according to the officer – the very picture of irritatingly aristocratic Imperial military middle management, with a pencil mustache, a few prominent implants, skin that looked like it wasn’t very well acquainted with sunlight, and an accent that would be best described as annoyingly posh – the dastardly Republic was up to no good again, preparing to take the offensive against Imperial holdings on Nar Shaddaa. The local Imp commanders were scrambling to piece together an extemporized force for a preemptive strike. So when an incredibly powerful tyro Sith Lady showed up on their doorstep, they started salivating.

 

I wasn’t particularly happy about the idea of my first fight being against Republic forces, but fortunately Aly didn’t make me have to choose. She grudgingly agreed to check the situation out, but only after a few hours, so she could get me and Vette started off on the Promenade.

 

“What about you, Master?” I asked.

 

She shrugged. “Quinn and I can handle this Republic stuff. Shouldn’t be too big of a deal.”

 

“I thought the captain was working on that intelligence thing.”

 

“Aaah, he won’t mind much. We’re still laying waste to the enemies of the Empire or something similarly faux-noble,” she laughed, then turned to Vette. “Besides, I made a promise to help Vette find her sister, so that’s the first thing we’re going to do.”

 

I barely knew anything about Vette’s history or her family. “Do you mind if I come along, too?” I asked timidly.

 

Vette smiled. “Why would I mind, silly?”

 

“Um,” I responded. Good question.

 

I’d been to the Promenade on Nar Shaddaa before, when I was investigating Baras’ spy network with my old Master. We hadn’t really had time to waste on just hanging out, though, much less shopping. And even now, I wasn’t really all that comfortable with the idea of wasting time and having fun while the fate of the galaxy was at stake. But then again, it wasn’t like there was anything I could do about it.

 

I guess Aly figured out what I was thinking as our taxi alit on the Promenade’s lower floor. She nudged me and whispered, “You know, I could order you to relax, too. We don’t want you turning into another Quinn.”

 

That made me laugh. “Of course, Master.”

 

Our first stop was a cantina, Vette’s meet point with her information broker. I didn’t even need to draw on the Force to figure out who he was as soon as we walked in: an Arcona, nervously lounging in a corner, surrounded by bodyguards with mean-looking expressions and meaner-looking weapons. Aly and Vette sidled up to them nonchalantly and dove right in.

 

I’d never been particularly good with languages – comes from a relatively sheltered upbringing on Alderaan, I guess, although that’s really just an excuse. So I had to wait until the Arcona was done talking to Vette and Aly before I got to hear what was up. Turned out he’d managed to find Vette’s sister, Tivva, after all, and she was actually on the Promenade, too. She also happened to be a slave, as expected. And there are really only a few jobs young female Twi’lek slaves get to do.

 

Aly told me all this on our way out of the cantina to the casino-barge where Tivva was said to be, um, plying her trade. Vette and I could barely keep up with her, moving just short of a dead run. I could feel Aly’s anger, and not just in the Force – the way she grit her teeth as she told me the story, the barely disguised disgust in her voice. Even her usual…uh…loquaciousness was replaced with clipped, laconic phrases that she wielded like they were blunt instruments.

 

I mean, I was feeling pretty bad about all this, too. No one should ever have to endure slavery, and definitely not the “oldest profession in the galaxy”. But Aly was on the brink of rage, and it was actually kind of scary.

 

If this had anything to do with her past, I could understand some of that anger and helplessness I’d felt before.

 

Vette, on the other hand, barely seemed to notice. She was almost deliriously happy. I guess she’d known about the sort of thing Tivva would be doing, and it didn’t surprise her much. She was just overjoyed about getting to see her sister again. Those were the sorts of feelings I could latch on to.

 

The contact point the Arcona had given her was an aging, bloated madam – also a Twi’lek – going by “Crystal”. I could see Aly wiping the emotion from her face as we walked up to her. But I could also feel the anger simmering inside her, just below the surface.

 

Crystal asked us if we were – ew – looking for work. I could feel Aly getting ready to explode, so I put my hand on her shoulder and used my other one to nudge Vette into talking before Aly ripped off this woman’s head.

 

“We’re not here for a job. We’re looking for my sister, Tivva?”

 

The older woman grunted. “Ah. Of course. I guess everyone has somebody that loves them.” She called out to a Rutian Twi’lek leaning against the railing of the barge, staring out at the city. Images forced their way into my head unbidden, as I tried to figure out what she might be thinking. Maybe she was weighing her life in her hands, thinking of ending it all instead of enduring even more humiliation…

 

Yeesh. When did I get so morbid?

 

Eventually, she walked over. She didn’t even seem like she was looking at us.

 

“Sorry,” she muttered disinterestedly, “no women, no groups. And no, I don’t wanna hear any argument.”

 

My face flushed red with embarrassment – not for me, so much, but for her. She was so resigned to it all… I looked over at Vette and Aly. Vette looked like she was about to burst, struggling to keep a huge smile off her face. And Aly just looked deflated.

 

“Tivva?” Vette asked hesitantly.

 

My Master’s shoulder slumped. “I don’t really think you see your…clients…anymore. You don’t recognize your own sister?”

 

I could see a spark kindling in Tivva’s eyes. “Ce’na?”

 

You know, I hadn’t really thought about how weird Vette’s name was. For a Twi’lek, anyway. I guess there was a reason for that: it wasn’t her real name at all.

 

Tivva shook her head, as though she were dreaming or hallucinating and we might disappear if she cleared up. “You’re still alive?”

 

Vette tried to shrug it off. “Despite my best efforts, yeah. These are my friends: Aly’s a Sith Lady, and Jaesa’s her newly minted apprentice.”

 

I waved weakly. “It’s a pleasure.”

 

“Charmed. Any family of Vette’s is…well, family to me,” said Aly warmly.

 

Tivva barely acknowledged us. “Huh. ‘Vette’? Is that what you’re calling yourself these days?” she asked. “Sounds like a gangster from the tech sector.”

 

“Old days,” said Vette with a little smile. “Long behind me. I’m keeping the name, though. So, I’m guessing this wasn’t a voluntary, uh, career move?”

 

She looked away. “I’ve been working here two years and it’s killing me. Kept thinking I’d be sold again, but I’m too old.”

 

Aly set her teeth. “Not anymore, you’re not.”

 

We all stared at her.

 

Vette was the first one to speak up. “You…you’d do that? I’d owe you so much…”

 

“You’d owe me nothing. This is what sisters do for sisters, real or surrogate.” Aly had this tight little smile on her face. “Come on, Tivva, let’s go find Crystal.”

 

Vette grinned. “See why I hang out with a Sith Lady?”

 

It took Tivva awhile to process what was going on. “I see…I see,” she said, more and more confidently. “We’ll be right back.”

 

“Right back” was probably overstating things. Crystal apparently wasn’t Tivva’s actual owner, and Aly had to backtrack through a couple of Cartel underlings to finally find someone who had the formal documentation. Then, after she bought Tivva out, she had to go through the legal process of manumission, which was, apparently, a lot more complicated under kajidic law than in Imperial space.

 

We spent a lot of the time in the interim chatting about Vette and Tivva’s family. Aly had already heard a lot of this, I guess, but of course I’d never had the opportunity. So I listened raptly as Vette told me about being owned by the pirate-king Nok Drayen, ending up as his daughter Risha’s best friend, and about her exploits with her Twi’lek nationalist ‘rob the rich to feed the Twi’leks’ friends. Like I’d thought when I first saw her, Vette had been through an awful lot for such a young woman. But her life had so many high points, too, not just the low ones – the sort of story that could give you emotional whiplash.

 

Especially the last part. Going to Korriban, one of the bleakest places in the entire galaxy, a locus of concentrated evil, to raid a tomb, being betrayed to the Sith and tortured for personal entertainment…then to be rescued and freed by the single most unlikely being in the galaxy. How did Aly describe herself? “A Sith who isn’t completely evil”?

 

Eventually, though, Tivva was formally, legally freed. Aly tried to give her seed money, to find herself a place and help her get a job, but she refused to take it, said she already had an idea about what she could do. Aly didn’t press her. We said our goodbyes, then the group broke up: Aly to go get Quinn and launch her little war against the Republic, Tivva to go start her new life, and me and Vette to go shopping.

 

By the end of the “day” – about midmorning, local time, because I was kind of still on the same schedule I’d been on as Master Karr’s apprentice – I was fully kitted out and fully miserable about it. I’d always liked the Jedi robes I’d been wearing – insulated without being stifling, they ‘breathed’ well, and, you know, they were pretty modest. The clothes I ended up in after our little shopping spree were…not like that. I was showing nearly as much skin as Tivva had been, had a goofy little hood that felt weird whether the cowl was up or down, and constantly felt cold.

 

I also had to learn to quit whining and deal, because like it or not, this was the sort of thing Sith apprentices wore.

 

Aly and Quinn were still out when Vette and I got back to the ship, so we both pretty much stumbled into bed and went right to sleep without another thought. My first full day as a Sith apprentice, and I hadn’t done anything egregiously bad, and got to spend a lot of time doing stuff that was pretty good.

 

Not being a Jedi anymore was working out pretty well.

 

The next morning, Aly checked in with Darth Baras.

 

“Ah, the latest Sith Lady in the Emperor’s arsenal returns!” he rumbled. “You’re just in time: I have need of you.”

 

Well, that was a fairly short vacation. Oh well.

 

“My Master on the Dark Council, Darth Vengean, wants war,” he continued. “Not petty skirmishes that tiptoe around the Treaty of Coruscant, but open warfare. Vengean has tasked me with finding a way to compel the rest of the Council to tear up the treaty.”

 

“Open warfare,” mused Aly. “That’s a pretty big deal. Why? And why now? You don’t seem as circumspect about this as you usually are, Master.”

 

Baras shrugged. “The Emperor signed the treaty for a reason, but no, apprentice, I see it as an opportunity.” I noticed he didn’t say for what. It stretched the limits of my imagination to picture a Sith Lord starting a galactic war for kicks and giggles. Then again, it probably shouldn’t have.

 

“I believe I have found a way to move the Dark Council and the Emperor happily toward war,” he went on. “Most think that our inability to find and defeat one man – General Karastace Gonn – kept us from outright victory and forced the negotiated peace.”

 

Aly raised an eyebrow-ridge. “Surely that’s an exaggeration, Master.”

 

He shrugged. “I said that ‘most think’ that, not that it was true. I was the architect of that treaty, as you know, and Gonn was only one factor – an admittedly annoying factor, but one among many all the same.

 

“General Gonn operates from the shadows, a phantom single-handedly preventing the fringe systems in the Kastolar, Halla, and Taldot sectors from falling to us. After years without a hint of his whereabouts, I’ve learned that he’s meeting on Nar Shaddaa with traitorous Imperial agents. You will go there, and you will kill him.”

 

My Master nodded. “What’s this meeting about, anyway?”

 

“He maintains the fringe systems’ independence by anticipating our moves, deploying his own resources for maximum effect. These traitors supply this information. Anyone meeting with General Gonn is guilty of treason and must be eradicated. We will not appear weak on this.”

 

She narrowed her eyes. “Unusual orders coming from you, Master. Normally you would prefer that I assess the situation.”

 

His voice darkened. “If you believe it is in your interest to appear weak, then by all means…”

 

Aly’s eyes widened slightly, and she gave an understanding nod.

 

“Without Gonn, the fringe systems will fall,” continued Baras. “Control of the outlying planets will be a great advantage. I am aware that you are already on Nar Shaddaa. Perfect: you can speedily deliver Darth Vengean’s red carpet to war.”

 

As Baras cut the link, Aly turned to Quinn. “Captain. Baras probably sent a data packet with information on Gonn’s whereabouts with that transmission. Open it: see what we’re up against, and relay that information to me.”

 

Quinn stiffened in that strange Imperial faux-salute. “Your confidence is not misplaced.”

 

She swiveled over to me next. “Jaesa, mount up. Let’s go see what this is all about.”

 

“Of course, Master.” Oops. Forgot about that pet peeve of hers. Her eyes tightened a bit before relaxing.

 

“Vette…um. The holoprojector’s yours, watch whatever you like so long as you don’t get in Quinn’s way. Or check on Tivva. Or something.” Aly cracked her lopsided grin.

 

Vette matched it. “Spend a day relaxing? Sure, I can do that.”

 

As Aly and I taxied out of the spaceport, the captain already had a little audio briefing for us: Gonn was apparently meeting at a safe house in an area of the industrial sector mostly owned by SIS front corporations and populated with one or two actual Republic military bases. “Safe house” would probably be an apt description.

 

Apt, that is, if it weren’t about to come under assault from a woman who, judging from that vision of Tatooine and the brief fight on my old Defender, wielded the power of some primeval goddess of war.

 

That was what was worrying me, actually. The prospect of violence. We’d just been ordered to assassinate a general. So I voiced my concerns on the trip into the depths of the Nar Shaddaa ecumenopolis.

 

“Master, um, Aly…how are we going to do this? Just like Baras said, show up and lay waste to the whole place? Slaughter everybody there?” I said uneasily.

 

She shook her head. “Nah. Baras is an idiot. It’s obvious that he’s running some other game alongside this one. Gonn’s a useful target for him, but he’s not even that important for control of those Mid Rim sectors. He’s just one general. He’s not the target.

 

“The real game probably has to do with those supposed traitors. He wants me to kill them and he doesn’t want me to know anything about them. Maybe they’re working for Baras and he wants them covered up, maybe they’re working for a Sith rival of his, or something. I don’t know. So we’re going to find out.”

 

“What about the general?” I asked.

 

She shrugged. “I don’t really know. I’m kind of making this up as I go along.”

 

I shivered. “You really haven’t gotten much better at being reassuring.” She just laughed.

 

We had a surprisingly easy time sneaking through the industrial area. Patrols were out in force, but I guess we got lucky: the Cartel and its enforcers were skirmishing with the Republic troops and droids guarding their territories, and we practically waltzed past them. Even the two guards at the safe house entrance were easy enough to distract…and then knock out cold.

 

With the guards stashed in a corner – no real need to stuff them into a closet or something, we’d be gone soon enough – Aly keyed open the door and it slid open silently.

 

Gonn might’ve been meeting with Imperial traitors, but it looked like neither he nor the Imps trusted each other at all. Both he and the Chiss man that seemed to be the main Imp representative were surrounded by gaggles of armed bodyguards. And they were so intent on watching the others for any sign of treachery that they didn’t notice us at all. I could see Aly smirk as she leaned on the doorjamb to watch and wait.

 

The Chiss had the floor, and he was talking animatedly. “General Gonn, I’m happy to report that Jedi Knight Xerender has landed safely on Hoth. I saw to it personally.”

 

Gonn rounded his desk and clasped the Chiss’s arm warmly. “You’re a valuable asset to the Republic, Fawste. Some day, the rest of the Chiss will follow your lead.”

 

“Not,” growled Aly ominously, playing the part of the barely-restrained violent Sith, “if they know what’s good for them.”

 

Gonn’s bodyguards tardily leapt into action. “Men, we’ve got trouble. Rally round the general!”

 

“Protect our allies as well,” cut in Gonn. He turned to us. “I think I can guess who you are, Sith. For all of Darth Baras’ covert manipulations, you have banged around the galaxy rather loudly.”

 

My Master spread her hands and executed an actress’s bow.

 

“Now Baras has finally found me,” mused Gonn. “I’ll have to be more careful, moving forward.”

 

Aly shrugged. “Back off now, and you can live.”

 

Gonn adjusted his pose, looking for all the galaxy like a self-important martyr. “Keeping the fringe systems free of the Empire is more important than my life.”

 

“Sith, you are Darth Baras’ apprentice?” asked the Chiss, Fawste, hesitantly. “We…we know of you. This, uh, this isn’t what it seems.”

 

Hey, Aly was right after all.

 

“What is it, then? I’m all ears,” she said, still smirking.

 

“As am I,” bit out Gonn.

 

Fawste knew he was caught in a cleft stick. “We, uh, we cooperated with General Gonn in order to learn, um, what he was up to. So that at the right time, we could betray him.”

 

I didn’t even need my senses to tell that he was lying. He knew that fighting Aly was certain death and wanted to skip out on it as quickly as possible. Which, you know, wasn’t a bad idea, but he didn’t need to insert a fake premeditated backstab to do it.

 

Admittedly, there’s no way he could’ve known that.

 

“Nicely played, Fawste,” ground out Gonn. “You’re a true lowlife. When this is over, so is our alliance.”

 

Gonn was confusing me. First he seemed intent on getting himself killed, and then he thought he was going to win after all, despite the defection of his ‘allies’? It was hard for me to believe that he was a great general if he couldn’t think this sort of thing through consistently. What was he even trying to accomplish? And if he wasn’t that great of a general, how could he really be Baras’ true target?

 

Aly was seeming more and more prescient.

 

She turned to Gonn and his cluster of troops. “Abandon your station and live.”

 

“Never!” he snarled. “Men, take this Sith down!”

 

He raised his arm to signal them to attack, but she had already lit her lightsaber and deflected the soldiers’ initial blaster bolt fusillade. It wasn’t until one of the soldiers decided to aim at me that I realized that, oh, hey, wait, I’m in this fight too.

 

I pulled my saberstaff from my belt and its double green blades flared to life with the familiar snap-hiss. My hands twitched, almost involuntarily, and one of the extending emerald bars shifted just in time to block a shot aimed at my chest.

 

Oh, wow.

 

Stupidly, the soldier triggered another few shots in my general direction. I barely felt like I was doing anything at all: the Force directed my hands, and the Force blocked his shots.

 

I still didn’t feel like I was actually fighting.

 

I guess he figured that out, too, because he quickly holstered his blaster and drew a wicked-looking vibroblade.

 

Well. Okay, then.

 

As he cautiously padded toward me, I risked a glance over my shoulder at Aly, who was still a whirlwind of boots and fists and that brilliant amethyst blade. Two of the Republic troopers fighting her were already down, but General Gonn and another one of his soldiers were still on their feet, fighting. Only the one soldier was paying any attention to me.

 

This did not make me feel any better about how much I was helping.

 

Any sane person would have second thoughts about fighting a Jedi or a Sith by oneself with a vibroblade. It took a few seconds for my opponent to get over his. It was clear, though, that he wasn’t really very good with his weapon. I was no great shakes with those Soresu defensive velocities that Master Karr had had me learn, but even I could block his hesitant swipes fairly easily. But that’s all I would do. I didn’t even want to fight a Republic soldier, and I definitely didn’t want to kill one.

 

Naturally, I didn’t get a choice. The guy figured out what I was about quickly enough. He saw he couldn’t hurt me, but he also saw that I wasn’t going to hurt him. And he went with the obvious solution: ignore me, and attack Aly, sidestepping around to try to spear her in the back.

 

I couldn’t let that happen. But I couldn’t kill him. And in five or so seconds, it wouldn’t even matter anymore.

 

I chose, and I acted.

 

He had to pass me to get to Aly, and as he rushed by I just lifted my lightsaber and stabbed him through the back, burning a hole through his spine and out through his torso.

 

Shiak: the killing stab. The most “honorable” of the marks of contact.

 

Boom, dead.

 

Except it wasn’t just “boom, dead”. His momentum carried him forward slightly and pitched him onto the floor. He rolled onto his back, and I could see his face. He was still getting some oxygen to his brain. His heart was failing, and he was basically paralyzed, but he could feel it all for the next minute or so as his body slowly shut down. He was dying, and he got to live through it.

 

I had to fight to keep the nausea down as I stared numbly at his still-twitching corpse. I did that. I killed him.

 

The words sprang unbidden to my lips, as though I were trying to unconsciously ease my mental anguish: “There is no death, only the Force.”

 

Yeah. Cold comfort.

 

But then I swallowed hard and backed out of the tunnel vision the fight had drawn me into. I was already a mess; I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I messed everything up for Aly, too. Woo. I got one guy. What a humongous help I was.

 

Fortunately, that was no longer a problem. She’d dispatched three people, including Gonn; the last one lay moaning on the ground, disarmed and nursing a broken leg. Crisis was over.

 

I could mope and wring my hands later.

 

Fawste found his voice. “You…you killed them. Please, mercy! I – we – will rededicate ourselves to the Empire!”

 

Huddling there, sniveling, saying whatever he thought we wanted to hear…Fawste made me sick. And, I realized with a little jolt of humiliation, he made me angry.

 

Fortunately, I wasn’t the one who was talking. Aly was, and she kept her voice calm and level. “What did you help Gonn with?”

 

“I…I helped a Jedi land on Hoth undetected. I believe he’s searching for something in the starship graveyard wreckage. But that’s all I know,” he stammered.

 

The corner of Aly’s mouth twitched. “Go back to the planet and try to learn more about this. Report to me and no one else.” She pulled a scrap of flimsi from a belt pouch and scribbled something on it. “Use this address. Encryption shouldn’t matter.”

 

Fawste took the note, visibly shivering, and bowed. “R-right away, my lady. Thank you for your mercy.” He scurried out of the room with his goon squad in tow.

 

Aly sighed. “I don’t think there’s anything left for us to do here, either. Back to the ship?”

 

“I just killed somebody,” I said numbly.

 

She spared a glance for the corpse at my feet. It – he – had thankfully stopped twitching while Fawste was trying to worm his way out of the safe house. “Yeah. You did. And if you hadn’t, he’d probably have messed me up. I know that doesn’t make it easier, but it’d really be best if we had this talk somewhere else. Like, not in the middle of Republic-controlled territory on Nar Shaddaa.”

 

I couldn’t find my voice.

 

“Please?” she asked. “We can talk about this in, like, an hour. We can have all the talks. But if we stay here, it’s going to get really hard to get out without killing more people.”

 

“Okay,” I said, rubbing my temples and shaking my head. Clear the cobwebs. Save the maudlin stuff for later. Don’t ignore it, just save it.

 

All right.

 

We didn’t hear any alarum until we were nearly out of the Republic-dominated area of the industrial sector. By then, it was already much too late to catch us. Aly and I were soon ensconced in a speeder back to the Mezenti spaceport.

 

We didn’t talk much – really at all – on the speeder itself. Aly muttered something about being tired of this “cardboard Coruscant” and ready to leave for Dromund Kaas as soon as we got back to the ship. I was more than happy to oblige. Back at the safe house, I’d felt as though I could barely move if I didn’t talk through what we’d just done. Now, though, I wanted to avoid it.

 

Aly’d commed ahead, so Quinn and Vette were nearly finished with preflight by the time we got back to the spaceport. It wasn’t long before we raised ship and left the Y’Toub system. I…appreciated getting away from Nar Shaddaa, and quickly. Nal Hutta, too, to be honest. I felt like leaving would help me cut ties with my past some more. Maybe I was being so maudlin and brooding because I was still thinking too much like a Jedi.

 

Or, you know, maybe it was because I was still holding on to a shred of my humanity.

 

Aly was in her quarters with the door closed when I finally mustered up the will to knock on the door and talk to her already. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when the door opened right before I actually knocked. Oh, right, other people can use the Force, too, not just me.

 

She was leaning back in her chair, feet propped up on her desk, wearing what looked like exercise clothes, and fiddling around on a datapad when I walked into the room. The door closed behind me, and she looked up.

 

“Hey there.”

 

I gave her a little smile. “Hey.”

 

“Come on, pop a squat. Not a whole lot of chairs in here,” she said apologetically, “but the bed should work okay.” She put her feet down and swiveled the chair so that she was sitting in it backward, facing me, as I sank down onto her bed.

 

“So, where do you want to start?”

 

I blinked my eyes clear. “I killed somebody today.”

 

She looked at me expectantly, as though she thought I was going to go somewhere with this.

 

“I…I participated in, was an accessory to, the assassination of an officer in the Republic military. I’m a traitor now. And I personally ended a person’s life doing that,” I said. Maybe keeping it couched in legalistic terms would help me get through this without bawling my eyes out.

 

Aly grimaced. “Yep. You did.”

 

I was, um, expecting more eloquent or sympathetic words from my mentor.

 

“You also helped save somebody’s life. The person you killed was trying to kill somebody else. Me. Am I your friend?”

 

I lifted my head and looked at her through raw eyes. “Aly, I…I haven’t had a whole lot of friends in my life. Gesselle, some of the other Padawans on Tython, we were close, but…you, I feel like I know you better than almost any of them already. Of course you’re my friend.”

 

Sith don’t blush. Like Vette said, it’s all red anyway. But her mouth quivered a bit. And I was probably flushed enough for the both of us.

 

It took her awhile to get her words out. “So yeah. You saved your, um, your friend’s life.”

 

“But he was just following orders, was just being a good soldier…”

 

Aly nodded. “Maybe. Maybe he fought us because he hates the Sith people and wants to wipe them out. Maybe he fought us because he was ordered to do so and soldiers take orders. Maybe he fought us because he was too scared not to. Who knows.”

 

I could’ve known,” I said fiercely.

 

She briefly looked puzzled, then nodded. “Right. The mind invasion thing. I thought…weren’t you worried about using it?”

 

“If it’s an alternative to killing somebody,” I said, “then it doesn’t matter. I have to. Life is precious.”

 

“Life is cheap,” Aly replied sadly. “A Sith Lord can have a man killed on a whim. You can buy a murder on Nar Shaddaa or Coruscant for the price of a meal. And in war, ‘a cannonball don’t pay no mind though you’re gentle or you’re kind’. We’re at war. He was a soldier.”

 

“That doesn’t justify anything,” I bit out angrily.

 

“You’re right. It doesn’t. You shouldn’t take a life casually,” she agreed. “I mean, remember why we’re here. I want to try to stop this war before the Empire kills too many people. That’s the point. I’m not trying to get to the pinnacle of Imperial power by standing on a pile of corpses.”

 

“You’re – we’re – helping your master start the war.”

 

“Nah. This war started a long time ago. It hasn’t been declared yet, but so what? The neutrality violations, mass insurrections, invasions, counterinvasions, all that stuff was going on before I even got to be Baras’ apprentice. And it’s not going to stop if you or I stop fighting.”

 

“That doesn’t absolve you or me of the responsibility for the people we do kill,” I pointed out.

 

“True,” she acknowledged. “I guess the question is, are you loyal to the Republic or are you loyal to people?”

 

Disloyal to the Republic? “Without the Republic, can civilization even exist?”

 

Aly shrugged. “That’s a fairly nebulous question. I don’t even know if it has an answer. But I think it’s a red herring. I’m not really interested in helping or hurting the Republic. I’m interested in helping people, and I’m interested in destroying the Sith – the genocidal, fratricidal magocracy, not the species.”

 

I wiped my eyes with my sleeve. “Helping people by killing some of them…”

 

“Yeah, and utilitarian crap like ‘kill the few to save the many’ is ethically bankrupt, just like ‘the ends justify the means’. I get it. Believe me,” she said feelingly.

 

“I guess what I’m saying is that killing when it’s unavoidable is a necessity. That’s kind of tautological. Sorry. Back up. Lemme put it this way: you were there. I gave Gonn and his people plenty of opportunities to walk away. Instead, they shot us up. This wasn’t some sort of mind game, killing people for what they might do, it was killing individual people to keep them from killing us, and after making reasonable attempts to avoid conflict.

 

“And, to be entirely fair, we didn’t kill all of the Pubs.”

 

My face twisted a bit. “How do you choose who to kill and who not to kill? How can you choose?”

 

“The same way everybody else does,” Aly said.

 

“Aly, ‘everybody else’ doesn’t commit murder on a regular basis.”

 

“Sure they do. Everybody kills to eat. Bacteria die by the millions when people breathe, although somebody like Baras probably kills way more than you or me.”

 

“Those things,” I said with an eye-roll, “aren’t sentient life. And killing to eat is different. It’s a silly comparison.”

 

“But they are life. So you drew a line. And I don’t think that killing to eat is that different. It’s you or it, whether ‘it’ is a nerf or kelp or a kroyie or whatever. You survive, it doesn’t. How’s that different from combat?”

 

“Because,” I said, fumbling, “you can defeat somebody without killing them. And you can avoid the fight entirely.”

 

“You’re right. Sometimes you can do those things. But food’s a choice, too. You can stay on a subsistence diet, hovering at the bare minimum necessary to keep from starving. Or you can eat more healthily. Or you can eat a lot of unhealthy things. You can choose the kind of food you eat. Stuff like that. There’s a lot of imprecision there. It’s just like war. Does the fate of the galaxy hang on you killing or not killing this one guy? No, probably not.”

 

I sighed heavily. “You’re making it sound like there aren’t any answers.”

 

She tapped me on the chin and smiled, trying to clear up my unhappiness. “I don’t know if there are answers. But it’s up to you to be an answer.”

 

My jaw dropped. “That sounds incredibly evil.”

 

“No! No, I don’t mean ‘kill whomever you like, because morality doesn’t exist’, or whatever. I’m not that kind of Sith. You know I’m not. Obviously there are things that are unquestionably evil. And it’s not like something is justifiably good solely because the person who does it thinks that she’s doing it for a good reason. Like I said, that sort of thing – morality of intention, ends justify the means, and so on – that stuff’s wrong. We can agree on that, right?”

 

“…Right.”

 

“But still, even there, there’s a lot of gray area. People take lives. You can’t get around that. Figuring out which lives to take and which ones to not take isn’t an easy thing, or a trivial thing. And no matter what you do, you’re always going to hope for a better alternative. But sometimes that alternative just isn’t clearly there. Sometimes you’re stuck. And even when you’re stuck you still have to try for that better alternative. But when it isn’t there, when you take lives, if you let yourself dwell on it too much, you’re not going to be able to solve any problems, and you are going to crack up. And that doesn’t help anybody.

 

“I don’t have an exact answer for you. No philosopher in history does, and I’m definitely not a great philosopher. I don’t even have a quick and dirty version, or an ‘I know it when I see it’ test. But I do know this: killing somebody doesn’t become justified if you beat yourself up about it. Which is what you’re doing right now.”

 

I smiled ruefully. “I get it, Aly.”

 

“Okay. Are you pretty much full up on weepy stuff for today, or were you also here to work through my past?” she said with forced good humor.

 

“I think,” I mumbled, “that it’d probably be best if we spaced out the emotional stuff for me. I’m gonna get overwhelmed.”

 

“Yeah,” she said sympathetically, “and I mean, think about how I feel when you turn those big gooey gorgeous brown eyes on me. I start beating myself up inside for making you cry.” Both of us laughed.

 

I stood up to leave. “Thanks, Aly. I, um, is there anything you wanted me to do before turning in?”

 

“Oh. Right. I’m your teacher,” she clucked mock-seriously. “Actually, I was thinking of a few things. We should start you on some combat tutorials tomorrow. Unarmed first. Gotta get rid of those bad habits you learned on Tython.

 

“But for stuff that you can do on your own, you did give me a really good idea. See if you can work on your empathy sense/mind violation thing. Try to get it to be more natural. If we can use it to avoid fighting, it’s worth a shot. Uh, that is, if you’re okay with using your powers that way. I don’t wanna push you.”

 

“I can do it, Master,” I said firmly.

 

Aly went to her patented eyebrow-ridge raise. “Do you want to?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“All right then,” she said, standing up. Then she stepped over to me and gave me a quick hug. “You’ve been through a lot over the past few days. I get that. We’re friends, though, yeah? If we’ve got problems, we can help each other solve them.”

 

I was confused. “Help each other? It seems like you’re doing the helping and I’m doing all of the moaning and moping.”

 

Aly laughed. “That stuff’s important. With the sort of plan we have…”

 

“Not much of a ‘plan’,” I said sourly.

 

“It’s good enough. Anyway, with the sort of plan we have, the sort of things we’re going to be doing, it’s important not to lose sight of what’s right and what’s wrong. You’re like our moral compass. Bring this stuff up when you think of it, okay?”

 

I smiled. “Okay.”

 

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Notes to Chapter VI

 

Yep, Jaesa's a traitor. And she actually goes much further down the rabbit hole than Jacen Solo did in his own Traitor. What treason means will be a touchstone later on - one of the secondary characters, who hasn't been introduced yet, will help Jaesa work through that knot later on.

 

As for

, well, I could hardly go a whole story without referencing Chris Cornell, who has a wonderful voice, or Casino Royale, which is an wonderful movie. Also, it's Jaesa's first murder, so there's that.

 

"

?...well, you needn't worry. The second is-"

[bANG]

"Yes...considerably."

 

That little exchange at the start is, of course, the beginning of the Nar Shaddaa Bonus Series, with Zavrasha and Colonel Harok. I inserted that little insulting ekphrasis of Harok there just to show how gross it seemed to me that you could flirt with him. And the other part is one of Vette's companion quests, "Memory Torn". I relaxed my little rule about two-person parties for that just because I wanted more Vette in this story. More Vette can never be a bad thing.

 

Baras' and Gonn's constant references to "the fringe systems" as though that were a term that meant anything always pissed me off. So I turned it into a conversation about some sparsely populated sectors of the Mid Rim between Hutt Space on the one hand and the Kashyyyk/Lantillies trade zone on the other. Because I'm silly like that, and because those places are next to Quesh anyway. I also always thought Baras' insistence that Fawste and his buddies be killed was a little strange, so I tried to come up with some kind of a reason for that, too. Unfortunately, there's not really any scope for Aly finding out about the reason before she gets to Quesh or Hoth, so. My little formula is that Baras believed that Fawste had information on Admiral Monk (instead of Xerender), a plausible thing to believe since he was meeting with Gonn (whose interests lay in the "fringe systems", not Hoth), and that Aly finding out about that little plan would derail Baras' attempt to embarrass Vengean over Quesh.

 

Also also, I thought that the notion that Gonn was the sole person to stand in the way of a dictated peace - when military exhaustion, Republic counteroffensives, and such were all much more relevant - was stupid.

 

Having said all that, although the confrontation with Gonn didn't make a whole lot of sense, especially in terms of dialogue, I wasn't sure what I could do to change it for the better. So the dialogue is almost completely word-for-word, something that will be happening progressively less and less as the story wears on.

 

I swear the fight scenes pick up again. This one was a little on the tame side because I wanted to focus on the moral implications of the fight. And also highlight the lols of how semi-useless companions can be sometimes. There are some real slam-bangers in there eventually. I promise. Also, Chekhov's Guns, because I AM A WRITER.

 

Given that the title owes something to the novel Traitor, I decided to add in some conscious references in the text as well. "Choose, and act" is one of Vergere's injunctions to Jacen, and Jaesa echoes that when she finally decides to kill the man she's fighting in the safe house. Later on, Aly's semi-coherent philosophical rambling is like a more drawn out and less effective version of Vergere's talk with Jacen on the nature of the dark side. It's got a decidedly different point to it: Vergere was a Jedi who thought like a Sith, and Aly is a Sith who thinks like a Jedi. But they both subscribe to varying degrees of a subjective morality.

 

Aly and Jaesa will have all the talks. :D

 

I think bright_ephemera was the one who first got me to think about Jaesa's eyes that way, and now I can't stop.

 

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Bitter Work

 

“A mugger’s blow may restore an amnesiac’s memory, a lover’s betrayal turn a person toward a saintly life of good works. The consequences do not alter the nature of the actions themselves.”

-Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763-1848

 

 

The trip to Dromund Kaas took a few days.

 

Most of the passage was through Hutt Space, and the Cartel was sort of lax on policing its territories. The ones that it wasn’t lax about were the systems that even Imperial ships weren’t allowed to visit. The Pabol Hutta, the main hyperlane from Nal Hutta to Sleheyron and Klatooine – the quickest way to get to the heart of Sith space – was off-limits to outsiders. According to Captain Quinn, the Pabol Hutta passed by the old Hutt homeworld, Varl, which was sacred to the Hutts, and also went through the cluster of systems called the Bootana Hutta, a series of fabulous vault-worlds and slave-nests. It was easy to see why outsiders wouldn’t be welcome there, but it also meant an awful lot of inconvenience for us.

 

Quinn and I hadn’t really interacted much in the first few days since I joined Aly’s “weird little family”, but I got to know him pretty well on our way to Sith space. That first morning, because I was still having trouble resetting my internal clock from the schedule it’d been on when I was training with Master Karr, I woke up pretty “early”, compared to everybody else. With nothing better to do, I heated up some pastries and went to the cockpit to eat breakfast and enjoy the view of hyperspace.

 

I just sat there for awhile, not really concentrating on anything, just staring at the mottled blue hyperspatial sky and munching away. It was kind of mindless, in a way, and mindless was probably good for me after the last few days. So it was pretty easy for me to hear somebody coming down the passage into the cockpit from the main hold.

 

“Hi, Captain,” I said, without turning around.

 

I could feel him stop moving, nonplussed, and briefly struggle with a response. “Well met, milady,” he finally said.

 

I swiveled the chair so I could look at him. The few times I’d seen him, he’d been immaculately dressed in the standard Imperial uniform, with not one hair out of place, the barest amount of stubble – probably juuuuust inside regulation length – and that, um, beauty mark thing. And now, at this ungodly hour, he looked…exactly the same.

 

Whereas I hadn’t really put on my face yet, my hair was kinda messy, and I was basically still wearing bedclothes, just some shorts and a top.

 

A real Sith apprentice probably wouldn’t get embarrassed about something like that, though, so I forged ahead. Then again, a real Sith apprentice probably would’ve tried to say something erotic and use the situation as an excuse to get dirty. Whatever.

 

“Um,” I said. “Nice to see you. If you don’t mind, could I ask you some questions?”

 

“I am at your disposal, milady,” he said stiffly. I had to give him some credit: he acted like he had a stick up his butt, but he certainly wasn’t fazed by weirdness.

 

“Okay. One, why are you up and about? And two, why are you calling me ‘milady’?”

 

“To answer the last question first, milady: you are Sith, and therefore are properly accorded respect by all servants of the Empire. Protocol dictates that ‘milady’ or some variant thereof is the proper form of reference in…casual conversation.”

 

Yeah, rub it in, why don’t you. That’s me, Jaesa Willsaam, Sith apprentice. But I didn’t let that distaste leak through into my voice. “Fair enough.”

 

“And secondly, milady, I have installed alarms on certain parts of the ship, in order to be alerted to any intrusions. The security of a Sith Lady’s personal vessel must not be compromised at any time,” he continued.

 

I swallowed. “Can’t imagine you get many stowaways.”

 

“There is a first time for everything, milady. ‘Tranquility is best secured by assiduous preparation for chaos.’” he quoted.

 

Or, as a prominent Senator had once said, ‘peace through superior firepower’. “That seems like a…good use of your time, then. Glad to hear it,” I responded.

 

“It is scant trouble at all, milady.”

 

I shrugged, and offered him the plate of food I’d brought in. “Pastry?”

 

He looked at the plate neutrally, but I could practically see the wheels in his head turning. Eventually, he said, “Much appreciated, milady,” took one, and sat down at the copilot’s seat to eat it.

 

We didn’t talk much for awhile, but after several minutes I felt like it was incumbent on me to break the silence and keep a conversation going. Sitting down next to somebody and having a meal without actually talking to them is kinda creepy.

 

“So, um. Aly…pia told me that you sometimes talk about, like, history and strategy with her. What’s that like?”

 

“Extremely edifying, milady. Lady Alypia has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the history of war. She is well aware of many events that seem to even have been omitted from the curricula at Imperial officer academies. In addition, her perspective on doctrine, while it does not always agree with that prescribed by the military, is also unique and thought-provoking.”

 

This was a side of Aly that was completely foreign to me. “So, does she teach you, too?”

 

He nodded. “In a manner of speaking, milady. She sometimes poses questions having to do with the art of war with solutions, hidden meanings, and so on, for me to work through. I believe that the knowledge thus imparted has significantly improved my efficiency.”

 

“Really,” I said, genuinely interested. “Like what?”

 

Quinn opened his mouth to reply, but it was Aly who spoke. “Why go with a recycled question when you can get one fresh from me?”

 

Startled, he bolted to his feet and stiffened in that weird Imperial salute. I turned to look at Aly, who was leaning against the wall of the corridor, dressed in a simple robe, hair cascading down her shoulders instead of tied back, like it normally was.

 

“Hi, Master,” I said nonchalantly.

 

She winced at the Master before remembering that we weren’t alone. “Hey, Jaesa. Quinn, sit down. At ease.”

 

“Yes, milady.”

 

I held out the plate of still-warm pastries. “Want some breakfast?”

 

She eyed it critically. “Are they still warm?”

 

“Should be.”

 

“Sounds good, then.” She picked two and sat down at the navigator’s station.

 

“So, Quinn was telling me about those military posers you like to ask…” I started.

 

She swallowed. “Mmmph. Right. Lemme think of one we haven’t done yet.

 

“Okay, so. This is going to be semi-devoid of context, but bear with me. You’re in command of an army attacking a tinpot dictatorship. You’ve scored some initial victories, and the enemy army is in flight, streaming back to its homeland. Supplies are short, though, so you’ve got to prioritize your targets.

 

“You could try to leapfrog towards major geographical barriers, seize major thoroughfares, and prevent the main body of the enemy army from getting back and regrouping. That’s one area. In another section of the front, the enemy’s main industrial region is within what looks like easy grasp: if you capture that, you can deny their remaining forces arms, munitions, supplies, the whole shebang.”

 

Aly looked at us expectantly. “If you try to do both at once, you’ll probably fail. So: which do you choose?”

 

Quinn spoke up first. “Milady, I believe that the industrial area is the superior target.”

 

“Why’s that?”

 

“Denying the enemy’s army the chance to rearm and refit will make it that much easier to destroy. Even interfering with the process of reorganizing their shattered forces will make it that much easier to crush the army when the time comes. Enemy morale will suffer. The enemy army will be useless as an instrument for counteroffensives, and it can be annihilated at leisure.”

 

“Sound enough reasoning. What do you think, Jaesa?”

 

I bit my lip. “I really don’t know much about war…um. Oh. You said it was a tinpot dictatorship. If the army’s destroyed, will the dictator’s hold on the populace be weakened? Could they revolt?”

 

“Good question,” she replied, “but no, that’s unlikely. The dictator has other means of keeping the population in check – ideology, nationalism, fear, and such. He’s also just crushed a dissident faction of the army, which has got everybody cowed and forced any serious dissidents underground.”

 

“Well, I guess if the army doesn’t exist, the industrial sector won’t have anything to rearm,” I ventured. “So it makes more sense to go after the army.”

 

Aly shrugged. “True, but it’s a bit more complicated. Assuming the offensives to wipe out the bulk of the enemy army succeed, they’ll have lost trained men and cadres, but even ‘the old, the sick, and the young’ can put up a fight on the defensive with heavy arms. It won’t necessarily be as simple as all that.”

 

“Oh.” This war stuff was a lot less simple than I’d thought it might be. “So what was the actual answer?”

 

“Yes, milady, I can’t say that I recognize the situation from history,” Quinn added.

 

She grimaced. “There wasn’t one. Historically, the commander opted to destroy the enemy army. But his subordinates frequently sabotaged his aims, and on other occasions he allowed ‘mission creep’, giving them too much latitude to do things that detracted from the central goal. The situation on the ground got to be so watered down from the commander’s original plan that it was as though he was trying to attack everywhere at once. And it didn’t work.

 

“Enemy resistance stiffened. The weather turned. The industrial area remained untouched, the enemy army was able to recover and reorganize. Eventually the enemy launched a devastating counteroffensive that piled up casualties, even though it was halted. It was several more months, thousands more dead, and millions of credits spent before the enemy was finally defeated.”

 

Her voice had turned melancholy by the end, and I could see why. “That sounds horrible…”

 

Aly’s mouth twitched upward in a half-smile. “At least the bad guys did lose in the end.”

 

Quinn had been sitting there pensively, but finally spoke up again. “So it seems as though the choice of industrial area or army was a bit of a red herring, then, milady. The real decision was to make a decision, and carry it through.”

 

“Exactly,” she said approvingly. “A commander has to prioritize, and then has to make sure his subordinates follow the plan. You can’t try to accomplish a million different missions at once, and you can’t let subordinate commanders lead you off on dead-end objectives. Put another way, what was needed was unity of command.”

 

“Huh,” I said. I wasn’t all that interested in military stuff per se. What I was interested in was the way Aly taught, the sorts of things she thought were important, and so on. And while I didn’t really want to need to know about warfare, I figured that as a Sith apprentice at the beginning of one of the biggest wars in galactic history, I didn’t really have a choice, either.

 

After some more idle chatter, Aly and I left Quinn to do his astronavigation – we were coming up on a course correction at Nar Bo Sholla – and headed back to the main hold. Once we were out of earshot, Aly broke down laughing.

 

Huh? “Uh, Aly, are you okay?”

 

She leaned against the wall and tried to wipe her eyes. “Haha…heh…I’m sorry, that was…wow.”

 

“What was?”

 

“You mynock. Were you trying to short out Quinn’s sense of propriety?”

 

I giggled. “Hey, it’s not like I expected him to drop in on me.”

 

“You’re such a bad girl.”

 

“A Sith apprentice has to keep up appearances,” I said primly.

 

Aly started laughing again. “Okay, okay. Whoo. All right. Let’s…let’s do some master-apprentice stuff.”

 

Down to business, then. “I’m ready, Aly.”

 

“I mentioned combat training yesterday,” she suggested. “You up for hand-to-hand?”

 

“Absolutely.”

 

Aly had set up a sort of gym in the cargo hold; Vette had shown it to me two days before during our little tour. After I got done changing into some more appropriate exercise clothes, I walked over. By the time I got there, she was banging away at a heavybag attached to the ceiling.

 

I hadn’t really done much hand-to-hand training, and definitely wasn’t all that familiar with martial arts. We’d learned basic stuff on Tython, but insofar as we’d learned technique at all, it’d been lightsaber technique, not unarmed combat. So I didn’t totally know what to expect.

 

It took Aly a few minutes to notice me and disengage from the heavybag. She smiled up at me sheepishly as she stripped her pads off her hands. “Hey there. Sorry about that. Sometimes it’s easiest for me to drain my emotions into the bag.”

 

I made a face. “I hope you won’t be hitting me that hard.”

 

“Nah. You wouldn’t learn much in surgical reconstruction on Vaiken Spacedock,” she laughed.

 

The corner of my mouth twitched. “I saw too much of what happened to Master Yonlach and Zylixx to think that’s funny.”

 

She shrugged. “I don’t have too much of a problem with beating up people who go looking for a fight.”

 

“You have a point,” I conceded.

 

“Always do. Now, let’s see what you got.”

 

We sparred for the next couple of hours, during the course of which I discovered that I definitely wasn’t in as good a condition as she was. Not just physically – I knew that already – but aerobically, too. If we’d been sparring for real, as opposed to for teaching purposes, she’d have wiped me out.

 

It was clear that Aly was slowly becoming dissatisfied with the way that the session was going. Oh, sure, I was doing some things right. She was happy that I used the Force to sense where she would hit next – “too many idiot Jedi fall for a stupid eyefake” – and that I was learning to use my hands to protect my core instead of using them to block strikes elsewhere. What really annoyed her was my hits.

 

Or, rather, the lack of hits.

 

It wasn’t that I didn’t ever punch, kick, or chop at her, far from it. It’s just that none of them ever did anything. I’d hit her with, say, a middle roundhouse kick and she’d completely ignore it.

 

“Jaesa, you have to put more oomph into this stuff,” she groused after one particularly embarrassing non-hit.

 

“Aly, I’m trying. You know I’m not as strong as you are.”

 

She shook her head. “It’s not that. Fighting is more than just physics. It’s effort. You’re not trying to hit me, so you’re not hitting me.”

 

I threw up my hands. “I thought this was a sparring session, not actual combat!”

 

“It is, but to a point. I need to be able to see what you can do. Otherwise, where am I supposed to start teaching you?”

 

“You know,” I muttered, “I’m not sure I want to punch you all that hard. With those cheekbones, I could cut myself hitting your face.”

 

She gave me a weird look and I felt the tips of my ears get warm. “Um. Okay,” she said awkwardly. “You don’t have to hit my face, though…”

 

“Fine, then, you show me a real punch,” I grumbled.

 

Aly opened her mouth as though to respond, then closed it and cocked her head. “All right. Why don’t you go into that locker over there and get out the body armor? I’ll help you put it on.”

 

I trudged over and opened the cabinet. “You mean this stuff?” I asked, pulling out some layers of gel packing.

 

“Yeah, that’s it. Come on over here.”

 

When I was fully kitted out, I felt like a Houk, covered in blubber. On the bright side, though, the armor didn’t really restrict my movement that much, and I could breathe pretty easily.

 

“Are you all kitted up okay?” she asked as I experimentally moved my arms.

 

“I think so,” I said. “Feels kinda we-“

 

I don’t actually remember her hitting me. I definitely didn’t see it coming. I do remember feeling like I’d been pushed, really hard, on my chest. And I remember landing squarely on my rear a few feet away, gasping for breath. Only then did the pain start. And boy, did it start.

 

All I could say was, “Oof.”

 

Aly walked over and knelt down on the mat next to me. “Jedi and Sith love to monologue before they fight. Hit ‘em when they’re not expecting it. It’s not like they have interesting things to say anyway.”

 

“Huhhh…haaahhhh…owww…”

 

“Not that you were monologuing like an idiot,” she went on conversationally, “but the idea’s the same. Besides, if you’d been ready for that, it would’ve felt way different.”

 

“Would it have felt…any less…like a speeder ran me over?”

 

“Anyway, that’s what it’s like when you actually try to hit somebody. Muscles and effort. I can help you with the first one, but the second one’s all you.”

 

“Do you do this to…every new apprentice…that you get?”

 

“Hmm,” she mused, “that’s actually not a half-bad idea.” Then she laughed and stood up. “When did you get to be such a joker? What happened to the demure, meek, obedient Padawan I met a few days ago?”

 

“I guess…you and Vette are already…making an impression,” I coughed.

 

“Fair enough,” she acknowledged. “Okay, sparring session over. Let’s go sanisteam, change, and grab some lunch, and I’ll pay you back for the sucker punch.”

 

Hitting the refresher gave me a chance to think, and to notice the nasty bruise developing over my sternum, and to finally start to look human again. For awhile, I just leaned against the side of the stall out of exhaustion if nothing else. I’d tried to keep myself to five-minute sanisteams when I was on Master Karr’s ship, but owwww forget that. Eventually, I got out, toweled off, and started to make myself look presentable again.

 

We reconvened in Aly’s cabin to talk over sliders. For a little bit, Aly and I just went through jokes and small talk. She mentioned some updates on Tivva, and how maybe we could visit my parents while we were on Dromund Kaas in a few days, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I felt totally at ease with her, like I was one of the group: one of the Sith Lady’s Loyal Companions.

 

Eventually, though, I bit down to the gristle. “You mentioned paying me back, Aly…?”

 

She sighed. “Yep. All right.” She blew her breath out, visibly steeling herself.

 

“You remember the first person you killed, but he was just a guy to you. You don’t know his name, you don’t know what he was like, his pastimes, his friends or family. All he was, was a face and a gun and a vibroblade that was about to end up in my back. And think about how much trouble you’re having with getting over that.

 

“The first person I killed was my older brother.”

 

I didn’t even try to find words for that.

 

“The Empire…it’s really a very hands-off society for Sith. If you’re not Force-blind, you get the run of the place. This goes for family, too. A Sith Lord’s dependents are basically viewed the same way as slaves. Children and spouses, their lives are essentially at the disposal of the head of the family. The state doesn’t care.

 

“Some Sith just do the garden-variety child abuse. Casual beatings, whacking the kids around, that sort of random brutality. Sometimes they even say that it’s for the child’s own good, because only that way will they learn the rage to truly become Sith. Sometimes they just don’t care. But at least the kids don’t die, most of the time, until they get shipped off to Korriban or wherever.

 

“My father, Darth Ricimer, wasn’t like that. He viewed his family as his personal property, which, legally, we were. He could do whatever he wanted with us. To us. He was the Overman. His chains were broken. The Force had freed him. And that meant that everything was just there to satisfy his personal needs. One need in particular.

 

“Some of my first memories are of being…violated. By him.”

 

Hot tears rolled down my cheeks.

 

She kept her voice level, almost robotic. “I don’t remember much of my mother. I do know that he killed her at some point, but nobody really seems to know when. Maybe it was after I left, or because I left. She taught me some of how to survive, day in and day out. I had to learn the rest on my own.

 

“I do remember my brother. Only sibling I had. He had to deal with the same sort of thing from my father that I did, except he was able to take it out on somebody else. The only person in the house that couldn’t stand up to him. Me. When I wasn’t being beaten or used by my father, I was being beaten or used by my brother, or I was hiding from both of them, or I was helplessly moaning, begging for someone, something, to make it stop.

 

“It didn’t stop.”

 

“Did anyone else know?” I whispered.

 

“Oh, they knew,” she sneered bitterly. “Sometimes I got to be recreation for other Sith that my father was trying to con into doing favors for him. And from what I found out later, my father’s tendencies were semi-common knowledge for the Dromund Kaas elite. Most of them didn’t even seem to think it was a black mark against him. Just business as usual. I don’t know for sure, but I think a lot of them even got him other little boys and girls to use.

 

“Those years sort of run together for me. I can’t say how old I was when something unlocked, there, inside me. Seven, maybe. Eight. Somewhere around there. I was hiding one night, trying to find a safe place to go to sleep. My brother found me and decided to have a little aperitif. There was nobody to help me, like always. So I made it stop myself. I made him stop. And then I ran.”

 

When I’d gone into Aly’s life, back on Nal Hutta, I’d felt pain, rage, helplessness. Abandonment. Despair. I could see physical scars, and I could see scars on her psyche. I hadn’t seen why. Maybe I hadn’t let myself see why. I just thought that whatever could make her feel like that must have been the worst experience possible.

 

I hadn’t come close to the truth.

 

“When I escaped, I was…feral. I could barely speak. I didn’t even really have a sense of right and wrong. But I’d discovered how to hurt things. I could protect myself. I could make sure that nobody could force themselves on me.

 

“I was young, but I knew that my father was a powerful Sith Lord. He had soldiers and other Sith under his command. I just figured any Sith I saw were his men and ran away from everybody. Deeper and deeper into the jungles of Dromund Kaas.

 

“I lived in the jungle for awhile. I could kill most of the animals there myself. Figured out what was edible and what wasn’t. Learned pretty quickly that the rainwater and streamwater there is bad, so I stole it from military posts and Sith encampments. But I was always on the move. Sith and soldiers were everywhere, and even though, in retrospect, most of them probably had nothing to do with my father, I still ran. So I eventually found myself in the one place on Dromund Kaas that they don’t go: the Emperor’s abandoned temple.

 

“The power of the dark side is…it’s very strong there. It warps your mind. Breaks it, if you let it. The place had people in it, but they were insane – befuddled slaves, crazier-than-usual Sith, that sort of thing. The ones that tried to threaten me weren’t capable of putting up much of a fight. I finally found safe places to sleep.

 

“And then, one night, I had a dream. A vision. I was…visited by a Sith Lord from the distant past. Later, I found out that his spirit was confined to the temple because of what the Emperor did to him.

 

“His name was Kel’eth Ur, and I guess he took pity on me. He’d been killed for his ‘heresy’, which meant that he’d been killed because he wasn’t evil. He’d decided that the Sith Code is garbage, that evil – the sort of outrageous evil that the Sith are all about – is stupid and unfulfilling and socially ludicrous, so obviously this was a Bad Thing and he had to die.

 

“And he shared all that with me. He helped talk me through the way I felt about everything. He helped me understand who I was. I guess you could say he helped me become who I am. Before I met him, I understood that Sith were evil. I hated what my father had done to me, what the Sith had done to me. Kel’eth Ur helped me understand why, and how, and more importantly, what to do about it. I didn’t exactly come away from that dream with my sense of morality fully developed, but I had a starting point.”

 

“He sounds,” I said hesitantly, “like a remarkable man.”

 

Aly’s eyes had misted for the first time since she’d started talking. “I helped his spirit find rest, a few months ago. I’m keeping his holocron, too, safe from Sith eyes. It’s the absolute least I could do. He saved my life.”

 

She blinked them clear and continued. “A few days later, a different Sith Lord found me. A real one. Lord Arho. Now he’s Darth Arho. Back then, he was a rival of my father’s. He saw me as a weapon. And I was more or less willing to leave. So I became a little agent in his private army. I already knew how to kill, but when I was with Arho’s goons, I learned how to fight, too.

 

“Wasn’t the only thing I learned, either. His new apprentice, a woman named Loyat, taught me how to read. She wasn’t all bad. It seemed like she was mostly there because she was in love with him. I think they’re still together, too, so I guess it’s working out for them, which is surprising because most Sith do a ‘flavor of the week’ thing if they bother at all.

 

“Anyway. Arho’s an idiot. The only thing that gave him an edge against my father was that my father was better at mindlessly murdering his own people than Arho was. I survived both of them. Eventually Arho cornered my father with a bunch of his goons, the ones that were left, and killed him. I watched.

 

“Arho didn’t care about what happened to me after that. I wasn’t even worth killing, I guess. So he just let me inherit most of what my father had owned. His version of a morbid joke. We barely spoke before that; we’ve never spoken since.

 

“At that point, I was sixteen. I didn’t know the first thing about running a household. But I was by myself, and I could handle ‘by myself’. So I stayed hidden. I kept training my body to fight the Sith. And with my father’s money, his old library, I could train my mind to fight them, too. History and warfare. I spent a long kriffing time learning about those things for a reason.

 

“Living on the streets while I was working for Arho, I got to know a lot of the lower strata of Dromund Kaas society. Street urchins like me. Some people who’ve been eaten up and spit out by the Imperial war machine. And a lot of the other people working for Arho – soldiers, officers, nobles, hired muscle – were just doing that because everything else was worse.

 

“I blamed my father and my brother for what happened to me. They were awful people and the galaxy is much better now that they’re dead. But I also blamed the Sith. I blame the Sith for allowing my father to gain power over anyone, for encouraging people like him, for leading them down that path. Any sane society would have locked my father up and thrown away the key. The Sith gave him an army and laughed it off.

 

“But that was just personal before I did my stint doing Arho’s scut work. Then I saw what the Sith Empire does to the normal people who live in it, too. I decided that nothing’s going to change for them unless somebody inside the Empire makes it happen. Several years later, a Korriban academy overseer heard about me and figured I’d be the perfect pawn in his effort to keep Sith bloodlines pure. I played along. Eventually I became Darth Baras’ apprentice. And now I’m here.”

 

“I…” My voice caught in my throat. I swallowed and tried again. “I thought, on Hutta, when I looked into your mind, I thought that I knew how bad it got. And I still couldn’t stop feeling sad for you. But actually knowing, this…it breaks my heart.”

 

Aly’s eyes hardened. “Don’t feel sad for me, Jaesa. I’m not telling you this to get your pity. I’m telling you because you’re my apprentice and you deserve to know.”

 

“That doesn’t matter. I’m sad for you anyway.”

 

“I don’t deserve it. I’m not a good person. I’m a bad person who’s just fighting worse people.”

 

“Aly,” I said feelingly, “you are one of the best people I’ve ever met. A few hours ago, I looked up to you. Now I admire you.”

 

She looked away. “I don’t deserve that, either.”

 

I think you do.” I put my hands on my hips, just like Vette had a few days earlier. “Are you calling me a liar?”

 

She laughed despite herself.

 

“You know what I did on Hutta?” I continued. “I compared you and Master Karr. He was like a shell, you know: one hit and it cracked and the dark void inside came out. But you, I thought, you were solid through and through, you took what the galaxy threw at you and didn’t flinch. Even though it was the worst of the worst. Even though nobody ever helped you. Even though you’ve had to deal with so much that even your scars have scars.

 

“And you just proved me right, more right than I could ever know. In the worst possible way.”

 

Aly looked down at the floor. “Th…thank you,” she whispered.

 

I wiped my eyes again and shook my head. “No. Thank you. Thanks for telling me what makes you you. For being willing to tell me. Just…remember what you told me yesterday. We’re friends. I’m here for you, Master. Aly. If you need it.”

 

“I think,” she said haltingly, “that I’m gonna need that a lot more before this is over.”

 

I smiled wryly. “It’s never over.”

 

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Notes to Chapter VII

 

Once again, the title owes something to an episode of Avatar: the Last Airbender, mostly because of the training sequences in common. Aang and Zuko go to work on Earthbending and redirecting lightning, respectively, while Jaesa starts to find her balance on hand-to-hand.

 

The quote is from a very good, very long history book. Schroeder was talking about the things that Napoleon did to Europe, and how many of them had ultimately positive effects. But those positive effects were mostly reactions to Napoleon, who played the role of a sort of scourge of God. And then there's Aly, who...well, some pretty terrible things happened to her, too, and just because they helped make her into the sort of person she is doesn't mean that they weren't, you know, terrible things. Instead of a mugger's blow or a lover's betrayal, she got a childhood of abuse.

 

Speaking of abuse: this chapter started out very easy to write. Picking on Quinn and writing fight scenes are both fun things for me to do. The conversation at the end was much more difficult. I think I managed to strike a reasonable balance between informative and "not breaking the forum rules" and being overly graphic, but, you know, I do worry. I've had friends who've been abused, although not nearly like that, and I tried to use the experience of talking to them to make the conversation as realistic as it could be while doing my best to avoid the sort of tawdry garbage you get in a lot of the mass-market fantasy novels that are aimed at teenage girls these days. But if you think it was over the top or not explicit enough or sent the wrong message or if it just didn't work, please let me know.

 

I'm sorry for making the chapter "hook" something that could've come straight out of the Essential Atlas. In my defense, maps are cool.

 

With that "preparation for chaos" line, Quinn's paraphrasing a very bad late-Roman author named Vegetius, who in De Re Militari said igitvr qvi desiderat pacem, praeparet bellvm, commonly abbreviated to si vis pacem, para bellvm, or "if you want peace, prepare for war". It's a shame that Vegetius' text was one of the few Roman military pieces that was well circulated in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, because it got unjustly famous while better works (like the Strategikon of Maurikios) languished by the wayside.

 

Aly's little strategy puzzle is a blatant reference to the situation in Western Europe in the late summer and fall of 1944, as the Allies pressed on toward the frontiers of Nazi Germany. It's framed the way it is because back when I originally wrote it, I'd recently read John A. Adams' The Battle for Western Europe, Fall 1944: An Operational Assessment, which is a decent book, if something of a polemic. And yes, before Jaesa came around, Aly and Quinn had those conversations because Aly wanted to show off and Quinn wanted to improve his efficiency. There have been less promising matrices for pedagogy.

 

Oh, and "the old, the sick, and the young" comes, I think, from watching my little brother play one of his Call of Duty games. The one where Gary Oldman and the Red Army besiege Berlin.

 

I think I got "mynock" as an insult from Aaron Allston's Enemy Lines duology, in the New Jedi Order. Hilarious books. Luke Skywalker says it to...Face Loran, I think.

 

Jaesa's "cheekbones" line is unabashedly taken from the excellent Sherlock, although she, unlike Irene Adler, wasn't really trying to hit on Aly. Jaesa's just awkward like that. And really, that particular female Pureblood face does have ridiculously sharp cheekbones. ;)

 

Like I said before, Alypia's named after the daughter of a Roman Emperor. Ricimer was the power broker that the real Alypia's father married her off to. He's also regarded by a lot of people as something of a villain in the history of the late Roman West; it's not really a fair portrayal, but I figured it was good enough to name our Aly's father, who is rather unquestionably villainous, after him.

 

Cameo time! Arho and Loyat are from the Republic quests on Ilum, of course. And she really is mostly involved in all of this because of him. Funnily enough, he finally does abandon her on Ilum, and an LS player can have her put in Jedi custody for psychological treatment/redemption. I think I used the phrasing "flavor of the week" because I was listening to

at the time. And yeah, Kel'eth Ur is from that quest in the Dark Temple, "Buried Power". It's sort of unclear whether his appearance is just a holocron recording or an actual manifestation of his spirit, so I sort of fudged it. Maybe the cron that Aly gave to Lord Alaric - hey, another late Roman reference - was a fake or something.

 

If it's not clear yet, the person that Jaesa was talking about in the first part of Chapter I - the person who thought that the story of her life is how she became who she is - is Aly.

 

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Open question: what do you guys think of the notes posts? Do you read them, not read them, think they're pointless, think they're patronizing, think they're helpful, think they're funny...?

 

Because a significant chunk of the reasoning behind them is to inform the readers, of course. But there's also another angle. I'm kind of treating this like an academic history paper in that I want to cite my sources. If I get an idea or a quote or the general tenor of a scene from someplace else, I feel compelled to give notice of that.

I give you an official SQUEE! :D

 

More! More! *pops more popcorn*

A squee, eh? Thank you very much. :)

Read all your chaper I U got me hook in this story

Awesome! :D I'm glad it did. Lemme know what you think of the other chapters.

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Diapason

 

“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.”

-Anthony Anderson, The Devil’s Disciple, II

 

 

After several days of being pummeled by Alypia – and finally doing a bit of pummeling in return – I had thought that arriving on Dromund Kaas would be a welcome respite. I was wrong. A few minutes after we touched down there I had already started to miss the endless speedbag sessions and sparring bouts.

 

It had taken a lot for me to recognize my ability to peer into people’s minds as something other than a burden. I still didn’t like it much. But after seeing what Aly had gone through in her life…well, it was hard for me to even think to myself, “no, I don’t want to understand this, and I don’t want to try to make it better.” Caring could be intrusive, and caring could hurt, but not caring would be so much worse.

 

But that empathy…when I came into contact with the people on the Imperial throneworld, it hurt, like something vacuumed out my insides and just left a void there. The weight of the dread and despair of the people on the planet was overwhelming.

 

The most galling part about it was that I had to smile and keep up appearances, because Quinn was coming into Kaas City with us, and I couldn’t show a sign of weakness, any indication that I was anything other than a typical bloodthirsty Sith apprentice. Maybe being Aly’s apprentice would give me a pass on the “bloodthirsty” part, but he’d definitely start to wonder about me having problems with dread and despair.

 

Every time I reminded myself that I wasn’t cut out for this secrecy thing, I had to also remember that I’d only been doing it for about a week. It only felt like it’d been years.

 

The taxi was unusually slow, which confused me, since I’d always had this sort of mental image of Imperials as being brutally efficient, an image that getting to know Quinn had only enhanced. At least it gave me an opportunity to look out at the landscape below us. Every so often, there would be a military checkpoint, but the majority of it was just trackless jungle. I could see enormous animals with vicious-looking claws and big frilled heads, packs of man-sized ferocious feline predators, and even a gundark or two.

 

One of the things that I did have some knowledge of was xenozoology, partially because Alderaan’s native species were just so fascinating on their own that I got interested in all the other creatures around the galaxy, too. And I was just seeing way too many predators on Dromund Kaas. The jungle was literally thick with them; over the couple of klicks from the spaceport to the city, I could see over seventy large carnivores, and I hadn’t gotten anything like a full count.

 

There were only a few reasons for this many predators in such a small space, especially given the lack of obvious prey animals in most of the jungle I saw. One was that the predators didn’t have the time to achieve full size and adulthood due to hunting by the Sith, Imps, Mandalorians, and so on. That way, they wouldn’t eat as much as a population with the requisite number of fully grown predators. And yeah, most of the animals I saw didn’t look full size, but I was hardly an expert. Another possible reason for the large number of predators was that I wasn’t counting their full food supply. They didn’t just eat the small herbivores. They ate each other, too. And probably also any unfortunate people – Sith, soldiers, slaves, unwary travelers – in the jungle.

 

I couldn’t figure out what was more stomach-turning: the thought of the number of people it would take to maintain this kind of predator population, or the thought that Aly had had to survive here when she was a small child.

 

When we touched down in Kaas City, though, I remembered what people had said about Dromund Kaas back in the Republic: going into the city didn’t take you out of the jungle. If anything, we were going even deeper.

 

The Citadel, where the taxi dropped us off, was, on one level, just the typical ridiculously grandiose Imperial architecture. You could look at it in a holo and sort of shrug it off as silly tinpot dictatorship posturing. It felt a lot different in person. The gigantic, monumental weight of the place as it loomed up over us gave the impression of a giant monster – a drouk, or a krakana, or some kind of terror from beyond – waiting to swallow us whole.

 

Quinn split off from us there, heading to Imperial Intelligence to try to wheedle them out of information for his vendetta against that spy. Aly and I went to the Sith Sanctum instead. As we walked, we passed dozens of other Sith. It was all I could do to ignore the fear of discovery, the sneaking suspicion that one of them had figured me out, had blown the whistle and sounded the alarm, and that a squad of inquisitors would be waiting around the next corner…

 

Fear. Gateway drug to the dark side. The enemy of sound, sane, logical action. More importantly: the enemy of doing my job. I had to squash that particular bug quickly. What would happen to me – to the mission of saving the people of the Empire – if I started acting ridiculously paranoid in front of these people?

 

And, what would happen to Aly?

 

I was still puzzling through since when did I care so strongly about what happened to Aly when we arrived at Darth Baras’ chamber.

 

The door had been opened, but Baras’ back was turned to it. He was having an animated conversation with someone else via holo, and gave no sign that he had noticed when Aly and I walked in. So we waited near the doorway and watched.

 

“…are you responsible?” asked the holo. “Was it you who took out General Gonn?”

 

“It was, Lord Vengean,” replied Baras with a little flourish – a grotesque gesture from an overweight man in a mask. “The fringe systems in the Mid Rim are now ripe for the taking.”

 

This “Vengean” stroked his chin. “Such an advantage will prod the rest of the Council out of passivity. They will see war is the only answer. You have delivered me what I most crave.”

 

“I will always serve you to the full extent of my abilities, Master,” declared Baras grandly.

 

I coughed quietly. Master, huh? This Darth Vengean must be practically ancient if Baras was his apprentice.

 

Vengean craned his neck. “Who stands by eavesdropping? I do not like to be observed,” he growled, putting special emphasis on the last word as though it were particularly disgusting.

 

Baras gestured us forward, and Aly led the way into the holoprojector’s viewing area. “My lord, this is my most distinguished apprentice, accompanied by one of her followers. She is the deliverer of General Gonn’s death.”

 

“I see,” mused Vengean. “Funny, you haven’t mentioned this one.”

 

Aly had a lot more experience than I did with the political machinations of the Sith, but even I could tell that that was a particularly juicy bit of information to have. Two things: one, Vengean was apparently so out of touch that he was unaware of Aly, even though she was, to hear Quinn tell it, one of the brightest rising stars in the Imperial firmament and an inspiration to soldiers and Sith everywhere…

 

And two, Baras normally told his master about his apprentices, but not about this one. Either he wanted to take credit for everything Aly did personally: possible, but probably not the main motive. Or, he wanted to keep Aly secret from Vengean in order to use her as a weapon against him. The shiv up his sleeve.

 

Alternatively, Baras was so old and feeble that he’d just forgotten to tell his master. Or Vengean was so old and feeble that he’d forgotten that Baras had told him.

 

On second thought, I decided, it would be best to leave the mind games to Aly and Quinn.

 

Vengean turned his attention to Aly. “You. Apprentice. By serving Baras, you serve me. Do you understand?”

 

Aly bowed from the waist, and I belatedly thought to do the same. “It is my privilege, master.”

 

Apparently mollified, Vengean turned back to Baras. “I am impressed with your choice of apprentice.”

 

Well, that blew over quickly.

 

“It is time,” he continued. “I will send my fleet to the fringe systems, and they will be mine before anyone is the wiser. You shall need to distract the Republic’s attention – and their reserves – elsewhere. The order is given, Baras: enact Plan Zero. Vengean out.”

 

Baras bowed as his master cut the feed, then turned back to us. “Excellent,” he said without preamble. “I have waited a long time for this order.”

 

Aly characteristically raised her right eyebrow-ridge.

 

“Apprentice,” he clarified, “Plan Zero is the systematic elimination of the Republic’s top military leaders – a preemptive strike that will leave the enemy headless.”

 

“Which group of top military leaders were you thinking of, Master?” she asked sarcastically. “Shall I start with the Supreme Chancellor and work my way down?”

 

Before I saw Darth Baras, I would never have thought that somebody could conspicuously glare at somebody else without ever showing their eyes.

 

“For some time,” he rumbled, “the Republic has organized military staff work for its grand war-opening offensive under the aegis of the Future Planning Committee, a subset of its Strategic High Command. It is more commonly known as the War Trust, and it is filled with several of the Republic’s most renowned officers.”

 

She perked up. “Who are these walking corpses?”

 

“They are the Empire’s most accomplished adversaries and not to be taken lightly. I have been tracking these targets for years in anticipation of Plan Zero. Unfortunately, the assassination of General Gonn has thrown them into some disarray. They have already begun to move. In a few days my network will know more, but for now: make ready your ship, and be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice. I will contact you when I have more information about your targets.”

 

Aly clicked her heels ostentatiously – sardonically – and we bowed. “As you wish, Master.”

 

I drifted back behind Aly as we left Baras’ chamber. As soon as we were out of earshot, I decided that I couldn’t hold it in anymore.

 

“That was fast. And anticlimactic. Does he always sort of appear out of the blue, give you some terse, ill-defined orders, and send you on your way?” I asked sotto voce.

 

She chuckled. “Pretty much. He’s not really much of a teacher. Only thing he ever tried to make sure I learned was the Sith Code. Other than that, I’m just an errand girl.”

 

“Do any Sith actually bother with teaching their apprentices, or is it just ‘throw them in the pool and hope they figure out how to swim on their own’?”

 

“Some do,” she replied, “but for most, the teaching’s really just an extractive process, not a nurturing one. Get what scut work you can out of an apprentice before she breaks down and dies. Also, I wouldn’t say that ‘hope’ enters into the equation.”

 

I shuddered. “They must go through an awful lot of ‘failures’ to get one Sith Lord.”

 

“Yep. If you think this place is bad, Korriban is ten times worse.”

 

Yeesh.

 

“Sorry to sidetrack a bit, but it seemed like Baras was taking the credit for things you did. Does he do that a lot?”

 

“Yeah, it’s pretty par for the course for Sith. Most of them, anyway. What was that quote? ‘…the latter accomplished nothing without the former, yet he, by some gift of his nature, gained the credit for everything’?”

 

It didn’t sound familiar to me. “Never heard it before, but I get the idea.”

 

“Ancient human biographer, from back when Coruscant was still called Notron. Uh, can I help you?”

 

This last she said to an astromech droid that suddenly appeared in our paths, tootling something in binary. I never learned how to understand droidspeak, so I was pretty much clueless. Aly could apparently get the gist of what it was saying, though, because after a minute or so of uninterrupted bleeping and blooping she told it that she was on her way and abruptly changed direction, going deeper into the Sanctum and gesturing to me to follow.

 

“What’s the emergency?” I panted, practically running to keep up.

 

“Somebody higher up on the totem pole than Baras wants to see me. Apparently it’s urgent, and Baras’ thing isn’t ready yet anyway.”

 

Subdued, I just said, “oh,” and kept up my fast walk.

 

The office we eventually arrived at was much sparer than Baras’, but at the same time it was vaster, too, nearly twice the size of Aly’s master’s chamber. That size seemed uniquely appropriate because of the man lurking inside it.

 

He was enormous, well over two meters tall, and imposing even when sitting down at his desk. Where Baras had worn strangely ornamented robes, this man had donned something else entirely: ablative, padded, jet-black body armor with prominent shoulder pauldrons, covered only by a black hooded robe. Baras had been almost cartoonish, with his odd clothes, beefy frame, and goofy mask, but his voice, at least, had marked him out as a man of quiet, hidden menace. This man, though, needed only his physical presence to seem terrifying and powerful. He looked every part the dark side warrior.

 

It was his face that got me, though. Completely bald, with graying, almost decaying skin, the typical Sith red-yellow eyes…and a breathing mask…I knew this man, knew of him, anyway. Everybody did. The second-most infamous Sith in the galaxy behind the Emperor himself, the man who had led the Sacking of Coruscant, the Empire’s greatest military genius, architect of victories and author of atrocities: Darth Malgus.

 

And I had thought that it was hard to keep myself composed before.

 

Aly stopped at the door. “Lord Malgus.”

 

“Enter. And congratulations on your new title, Lady Alypia. Even your master, it seems, is capable of recognizing a great talent when it is right in front of his face.”

 

I guess she decided that didn’t really warrant much comment. “You summoned me…?”

 

He put down a datapad he’d been scanning and rose from his seat, skirting his desk to speak face-to-face. “Correct.”

 

You know, if anybody’d told me a few months before that I was about to do hatchet work for the man responsible for some of the worst war crimes of the last century, I wouldn’t even have laughed at them, I’d have alerted the Temple medical staff.

 

“The war,” he continued, “is shifting into higher gear. The Expeditionary Fleet is on the eve of departure for a campaign in the Veragi sector. Our primary goal – our stated goal – is the disruption of Republic links with the Gree Enclave. But there is another, more secret aim to this campaign as well.

 

“For three hundred years, our Emperor has held a Jedi Master prisoner, prolonging his life and his torment. The Jedi Master possessed a secret: the location of the Foundry, an ancient space station of untold power. Both the Jedi and the Foundry are central to this campaign’s goals.”

 

“What do we know about the Jedi and this space station?” asked Aly.

 

“Both of them possess the power to dominate worlds. The details are not your immediate concern.”

 

The corner of her mouth twitched. “That’s…hardly standard operating procedure.”

 

“These are hardly standard circumstances,” he said dismissively, then continued with his impromptu briefing. “The Emperor sought to pry the Foundry’s location from the Jedi’s mind, but for centuries, he resisted. So the Emperor has set him free. Predictably, the Jedi Master fled to his Foundry, and brought a Republic armada with him: he has led us to our prize, if we have the courage to claim it.”

 

She snorted. “Set him free. Sure. Just like we ‘let’ that installation on Taral V get wiped out.”

 

Malgus shrugged equably. “Whether it came about as a result of the Emperor’s intent is immaterial. Purposely or not, we now have the opportunity to seize the Foundry, and deny it to our enemies. I am given to understand that your master is orchestrating a plan to derail an imminent Republic offensive. Preventing the Republic from using this Foundry would be of a piece with his ‘Plan Zero’.”

 

Huh. I wonder how he knew about that.

 

“I have detached a task force of thirty starfighter carriers and Terminus-class destroyers under the command of Moff Phennir to oversee this operation. It is massing in the Mid Rim in the Dorajan system. The fleet will not be fully assembled for several days, but if you are interested in assisting with the capture of the Foundry, you should be able to arrive with some time to spare.”

 

Aly stood there, chewing on her lip. Finally, she said, “Tell Phennir to expect me in five days.”

 

“He, along with the rest of the usual suspects, will await you on his flagship, the White Nova.”

 

She smiled broadly. “Should’ve known you’d be putting the team back together.”

 

“It is indicative,” he said heavily, “of the threat this Foundry poses us, and the opportunity inherent in gaining it intact.”

 

“Nevertheless…I’m honored that the Empire has called upon me in its hour of need.”

 

He inclined his head. “And it is grateful to have you.”

 

With that, he turned back to his desk, and Aly and I took the signal to leave. We didn’t speak again until we had passed back through the Sanctum to the speeders outside.

 

“Should we wait for Quinn?” I asked.

 

“Nah, he’s got enough stims and caf to keep him at Intelligence until we’re ready to raise ship for Lannik space.”

 

I frowned. “That doesn’t sound healthy.”

 

She smirked. “It sure doesn’t, but you try interfering with the Imperial military’s vaunted efficiency.”

 

“So, um, why can’t we just leave right now?”

 

Aly gave me an odd look. “Weren’t you paying attention earlier? Vette’s using the Fury to go handle a thing for me on Ashas Ree. We’re running low on medical supplies. She’ll be back in the morning.”

 

I flushed. “Oh. Um. Sorry, I just…I’ve been distracted ever since we got here.”

 

She cocked her head and ushered me into the speeder. “Well, you can tell me about it on the trip.”

 

“Where are we going?”

 

“Place to stay for the night. It’s about a hundred klicks northwest of here. Don’t worry about clothes and toiletries and stuff, it’s all taken care of.”

 

“…your parents’ house?” I hazarded.

 

My house. But yeah. That mansion thing.” She lifted off and took the speeder on a lazy swing over Kaas City, then banked sharply and lit out.

 

“So, Aly, uh, you seemed eager enough to go after this Foundry thing. But if it means fighting against Jedi and more Republic troops, I don’t think I can do that. Not yet. The last ones were bad enough…” I trailed off.

 

“I signed on mostly because if Malgus is right and these guys are massing for an offensive, breaking the Foundry prevents them from invading the Empire. That’s what I’m after, here: a spoiling attack. If a Republic fleet fresh from the Foundry shows up and bombards Dromund Kaas or Krayiss II or wherever, it’s those ordinary people that get killed.”

 

I grimaced. “That’s well and good for you, but I don’t know if I’m all the way on board with that yet.”

 

“You won’t need to be,” she replied. “Remember what Malgus and I were saying about ‘the team’? I’ve got a few friends that know what they’re about. The newly minted Grand Champion of the Great Hunt, a Cipher agent from Intelligence, and a Sith sorceress I met back on Korriban. We’ve done this sort of thing for Malgus before, on Athiss and fighting the Mandos of Clan Varad. Going after the Foundry is going to be more of the same, but like a harmonic, an octave above. We’ll be fine.”

 

“So what do I do when you’re off fighting Jedi?”

 

Aly shrugged. “Kick back on the White Nova and relax? Maybe you’ll make some friends.”

 

“Befriending diehard Imperials isn’t exactly the easiest thing for me. I mean, look at how standoffish Quinn gets.”

 

“Not all of them are evil incarnate or ‘diehard Imperials’. Next to you and Vette, Cipher Nine is one of my closest friends. She’s fun, and she picked up a diplomat on Alderaan in her crew who’s also pretty nice. I will grant you that Majnun, our bounty hunter, is amoral, even borderline sadistic, but his girlfriend, Mako, is almost the complete opposite. Don’t ask me how they managed to hook up, because I have no idea. And Lady Sakaria…well, she’s all over the map. Hangs out with an ancient Dashade Force-user-devouring monster. But most of the time, she’s crazy, but a nice sort of crazy.”

 

I ventured a laugh. “A ‘nice sort of crazy’?”

 

“Yeah, it sounds weird, I know. I won’t pretend that Saki’s all sunshine and butterflies, but she does care about her friends. And she used to be a slave. You think my early life was miserable, well, just imagine hers. On Korriban, she had a way rougher time than I did. A few months ago, I thought she was doing pretty well – bookish girl with crazy Force powers apprenticed to a friendly Sith Lady who was just as nerdy – but then something weird happened on Alderaan that she still won’t talk about, and I just heard about her Master dying…yeah, I dunno.”

 

I shifted in my seat. “Oh.”

 

She looked over at me and smiled. “Hey, don’t worry about it. Just play your role and try to have fun.”

 

“Sorry, I don’t want to be a killjoy, I just…”

 

“Right,” she said. “That distraction. What’s the problem?”

 

It all came tumbling out in a rush. “Being here. This whole planet…there’s just so much hate, dread, despair, death…it feels like I’m drowning. Seeing the jungle where you had to live as a little girl, coming face-to-face with the Empire’s dark knight, and now I’m going to spend the night in a place where some of the most horrible things imaginable were done to somebody…it’s just too much.”

 

“It’s harder for you because of your empathy, isn’t it?” she asked sympathetically.

 

“Maybe. Probably. I don’t know.”

 

Aly shook her head. “I think I get it. It’s okay for you to admit that there’s a problem. It’s not even your fault, not at all. Don’t worry about it. We’ll be leaving soon enough. It really isn’t healthy for you to be here.

 

“But,” she continued as she slowed the taxi and brought it down to land, “you should at least stay up for dinner.”

 

I looked out over the grounds of the family estate. Much of the surrounding jungle had been cleared, and remained cleared, tended by droids. It looked like there was some kind of shield up around the place, too. Standard precautions, I guess, for a Sith Lord to take in the midst of his enemies.

 

The house itself was less of a house and more of a complex, a series of outbuildings and annexes surrounding the main structure, an edifice as ominous and gloomy as the Citadel itself, albeit not even remotely as large. It didn’t exactly compare to Castle Organa in size, but it wasn’t that much smaller.

 

I felt a little sick to my stomach as I walked toward the main house. Whether this was because I knew what had happened here once upon a time, or because the house itself was just that spooky…well, I didn’t bother to sort that out.

 

Aly’d been waiting up at the main entrance for awhile by the time I finally trudged up the steps, but when I got there, she just stood there grinning like a lunatic instead of opening the door.

 

“Uh, Master, are you going to get that?”

 

She just kept smiling. “That’d be impolite, wouldn’t it?”

 

Impo…huh? What was this all about? Was there somebody in there?

 

Finally, the door slid open and an extremely familiar voice emanated from inside: “…Alypia?”

 

Aly turned back to the door, still wearing that crazy grin. “Hey, Gregor. Nice to see you again.”

 

Gregor? “Dad?

 

My father’s head poked out the door. “Jaesa?...Jaesa!”

 

Okay, rational thought could take a vacation.

 

I charged through the door and almost bowled my dad over, hugging him so tightly that he started to sound like he was having trouble breathing. I couldn’t even figure out what to say, and I had the same ludicrous stupid smile that Aly was wearing, and Dad was hugging me back, and I felt like I was bawling my eyes out, and what were my parents even doing in this house, and and and and.

 

Eventually my dad managed to say something. “My baby girl…I never thought I’d see you again.”

 

“I…I never…how? I thought Baras…how’d you get here? This house? What about Mom? It’s just…it’s so wonderful to see you again after so long…”

 

You’d think after the emotional whiplash of the last week I’d have figured out how to keep myself from babbling like an idiot. That’d be giving me way too much credit.

 

Back when I’d heard my parents had left Alderaan in the company of “the Sith from Tatooine”, I’d thought about our relationship, how we maybe weren’t as close as we could’ve been. I guess I’d been blaming myself for a lot of that ever since, even if it didn’t make much sense to do that. Seeing my dad again…well, maybe a lot of this happiness came from the opportunity to start fresh with them. And some of it came from having a connection to the past that hadn’t been completely ripped apart.

 

Maybe he was thinking the same way.

 

“One at a time, sweetie,” Dad said as he extricated himself from the hug. “Oof, since when are you so strong?”

 

Aly giggled, and I shot her a dirty look. “It’s…well, my Master thinks physical fitness is extremely important,” I said lamely.

 

Dad looked confused. “Yes, your Master…Master Karr, wasn’t it? Is he well? And…wait, what are you doing on Dromund Kaas? Aren’t you with the Jedi? And what happened to your clothes?”

 

Oooooohhhh. Right. That was going to be fun to explain.

 

I caught Aly’s eye. “Uh, how much should I say?”

 

She shrugged. “All of it, if you like.”

 

“Um. Okay.” Where could I even start? “Dad, I…Master Karr was not a well man. He had a vendetta with Darth Baras – you met him, right?”

 

He nodded. “Such a strange man. That interview in his office made my skin crawl.”

 

“Well, it turned out that Master Karr wasn’t really concerned about training me as a Jedi. He just wanted to use my powers, use me, to fight Darth Baras. He fought Aly, and he tried to draw on the power of the dark side to kill her. I…I saw what he did, and it scared me, that a Jedi Master could fall so far. And then I met Aly, and saw what she was trying to do – trying to make the Empire a better place from the inside. So I quit the Jedi Order and now I’m Aly’s apprentice.”

 

Dad’s eyes widened. “You became a Sith?”

 

I shook my head emphatically. “No, Dad. I’m only pretending. I don’t really work for the Sith. I work for Aly.”

 

“Ohhh…” he trailed off. Then he shook his head as if to clear it. “I’m sorry, sweetie, it’s just…this is all so different from what I was expecting.”

 

“Imagine,” I said with a little half-smile, “what it’s like for me. I know the Sith are evil. But Aly isn’t, right? Look at what she’s done for you guys.”

 

He cocked his head. “No…no, you’re right. I see what you mean. A fake Sith…it’s a lot to take in. But what about the danger?”

 

“Dad,” I said feelingly, “I’m in as much danger as I would be if I were a Jedi Knight. But this way I can try to help people who’ve got nobody else to fight for them. The Jedi are working to save the people of the Republic. Who’s working to save the people of the Empire?”

 

I knew my dad wasn’t stupid. But living as a servant, he didn’t really have to deal with the nuances. He’d seen the Sith attack Alderaan; he’d seen the Jedi defend it, and push them back. Dark and light, black and white. If I’d had problems figuring out what Aly was doing, back when I was with the Jedi Order, I could only imagine how he thought of it. So couching things in terms he could deal with – “fake Sith”, “working to save people” – it was a little simplistic, but easy enough to grasp.

 

“I understand.” Tears welled up in his eyes. “My brave, selfless little girl…”

 

I hugged him again. “I love you, Dad.”

 

“I love you too, Jaesa,” he murmured. “Your mother and I…whatever you do, we’re behind you. All the way.”

 

After a while, I finally spoke again. “So…where is Mom?”

 

“Oh, she’s just taking a nap while the droids make dinner. Ah, that reminds me! I’m sorry to leave us all out here standing on the stoop. Come in, come in.”

 

We all passed through the doorway into the enormous vestibule. It looked like Mom and Dad had done some redecorating, with traditional Alderaanian sculptures and holoprojected paintings sitting in alcoves that, presumably, had once held Sith…stuff. I wasn’t about to object to the change.

 

Dad started to lead us on a brief tour of the new house layout, mostly for my benefit – showing me the guest rooms, the library, and so on. As we passed down the halls, I elbowed Aly, who was still smiling. “Why didn’t you tell me you moved my parents into your house?”

 

“Oh, it’s their place now. It’s not as though I have any use for it. Besides, I promised them they’d live like kings,” she laughed.

 

“I thought you said that Baras had custody of them!”

 

“Not exactly. He contributed some of the security, but I trust him about as far as I can throw him.” She paused to give me time to laugh. “This estate has a lot of defenses. Automated, shielded, and even some fairly spooky dark side traps my father set up that I’d probably have to ask Sakaria to disarm – and which do a better job of scaring off Sith than any private droid army. Your parents are about as safe as they can get here.”

 

“Not to mention,” I added, “that they’re under the protection of the goddess of war.”

 

She had a weird look on her face. “That’s what you call me?”

 

“I…um, well, I think you’re a, ah, very powerful and good at fighting?” I stammered.

 

Aly didn’t even have to do her eyebrow-raise thing. It was just implied.

 

Fortunately, at that point we got to the salon. “Oh! Um, wow. Very snazzy room, with the, uh, those…all the decorations. What time’s dinner?” I asked, anxious to change the subject.

 

Dad turned back around. “We can have it whenever you like. Are you hungry?”

 

“Yes! Yes, I’m starving.” That, at least, wasn’t a lie.

 

“All right, I’ll go wake up your mother. Just let the droids know what you want to eat.”

 

I guess Dad warned Mom that I was there before she came down for dinner, because she didn’t keel over from shock when she saw me. She didn’t take the whole ‘Sith news’ any better than he had, though. It took awhile for me to explain that I was Aly’s apprentice – friend, companion, comrade, that sort of thing – and not really Sith. I got the sense that Dad trusted Aly a lot more than Mom did, because it took a lot more persuading for me to finally get through to her, but eventually it seemed like she was okay with it.

 

And by that time, dinner was ready. After a few months of training with Master Karr in the back of beyond, and then a week shipboard with Aly and the crew, I’d been anxious to get my hands on a real meal – something that couldn’t just be dumped out of a package and heated up in a couple of minutes. So while Aly munched on some ribenes and my parents ladled themselves out some thick soup, I attacked a plate full of some kind of fried, breaded crustaceans with a hot, sweet dipping sauce.

 

The table talk mostly focused on my parents early on. I was anxious to hear about all the changes they had been making to the estate, and the sort of things they’d been up to ever since moving to Dromund Kaas. As it turned out, “living like kings” wasn’t a bad description. With the droids there to take care of pretty much all the physical labor, they barely knew what to do with themselves.

 

And while Aly’s father’s old war chest, full of loot from a dozen conquered worlds, had mostly been confiscated by Darth Arho, Aly’d invested what was left with enough foresight that my parents could live off of it for a couple of lifetimes. I’d never really thought about what a Force-sensitive person could do with financial markets before, but it made sense. Anyway, it took Mom several days to get into the habit of not doing all the servant work she’d been doing for the Organas. Dad, on the other hand, and somewhat to my surprise, had been taking full advantage of Aly’s extensive library, and was full of questions about the philosophers, historians, mystery writers, and so on that made up the bulk of her collection.

 

I’d thought it was a little strange that they were so relatively relaxed around Aly. I figured that they’d treat her more or less like a surrogate Organa noble or something. But I’d forgotten – and was soon reminded – that Aly had been the one to get Mom and Dad settled here in the first place. They’d had a few days to get to know each other pretty well – and for Aly to wean them off of referring to her as “Sith” and, later, “milady”.

 

Then, inevitably, we started talking about me. First it was fairly vanilla stuff. I told Mom and Dad about training as a Jedi, in the broadest strokes, and then about meeting Aly, Vette, and Quinn. I spent a lot of time talking about going to free Tivva, which got everybody at the table sentimental and teary-eyed for awhile.

 

But then the conversation shifted to what I was like as a kid. Dad regaled Aly with tales about my mixups and embarrassments, like when I thought Lady Renata Alde was my mom and went back with her to House Alde after a reception, or when I tripped at a reception and accidentally splattered a Teraan ambassador with two-hundred-year-old wine.

 

Needless to say, I spent that part of the conversation doing an excellent impression of Aly’s skin color.

 

Eventually Dad and Aly went off to sort through the library, and Mom and I had the table to ourselves. For awhile, we just sat there, finishing our meals in silence.

 

“I don’t understand,” I said finally.

 

Mom looked up. “Understand what?”

 

“How you and Dad are so…okay with being here. Living on the Imperial throneworld, surrounded by Sith and Imps and dangerous animals and the feelings of palpable despair and hate…”

 

“Jaesa, sweetheart, we’re not Force-sensitive. We don’t feel that despair and hate like you can. For your father and me, Dromund Kaas is a bit dreary, but hardly oppressive. Especially since we don’t really have to spend time around any actual Sith.”

 

I waved that off. “Sure, but what about the danger? And the incongruity? Don’t you feel like spending your retirement here is weird?”

 

She shrugged. “There are always tradeoffs. We can’t be very social, but it’s not as though we were particularly social on Alderaan, being just servants and all. And you have to understand, working for the Organas…it was nice, in some ways, but that was all we were ever going to do. Servant work until we got too infirm to do anything. We didn’t have the means to retire. And when you went off to become a Jedi, we couldn’t count on you to support us as we got older…”

 

There it was again, the vibroshiv in my gut. “So this is my fault,” I said bitterly.

 

“No! Never. We wanted you to have the best life you could. Reach your potential, doing the things you wanted to do. That was always what was most important. And if it meant that, as parents, we couldn’t be there with you, then that was what had to happen. But then, when Alypia came along, well, your father saw it as a way out. We could retire peacefully and let you live your dream.”

 

She looked away. “I didn’t see it that way at first. But so far, living here has been one of the happiest times in my life. And then, getting to see you again…this isn’t a bad thing, Jaesa. We’re all together again. And as long as you’re happy, we’re happy too.”

 

I smiled weakly. “You’re a lot better at being reassuring than Aly is.”

 

Mom pushed her bowl aside. “That’s…something I want to talk to you about,” she said carefully.

 

“Sure. What do you want to know?”

 

“You said that she was your teacher and your friend, and that you were working together?”

 

“Yeah, she’s really smart, and she knows about all sorts of philosophical things, and she’s noble, and she’s a great warrior, and I’m learning so much from her already,” I gushed.

 

“Are you sure that’s all she is to you?” she asked.

 

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

 

“Well, just now, when you had all those wonderful things to say about her…I don’t want to say ‘too good to be true’, but…”

 

“Mom, when I first met her, I thought that, too. But you remember my power, right? I can see into people’s minds. There’s no deception there. What Aly’s showing me is a hundred percent real.”

 

“All right, let me say this in a different way. Do you care about her?”

 

That was a silly question. “Sure, of course. She’s my friend.”

 

“Do you care for her?” she continued.

 

“I…oh.” I blinked.

 

“Seeing the way you look at her, listening to how you talk about her…you make me think that there’s something else there, too. That you’re not just friends.”

 

My first instinct was to whine and bluster and roll my eyes and go, “Mommmm”, but I stopped myself.

 

Instead, I said: “I…hadn’t even thought about it like that.”

 

“Maybe,” Mom said gently, “you didn’t let yourself think about it like that.”

 

I definitely wasn’t going to try to talk my way past that. I could barely even breathe.

 

“But I’m not really worried about that. You are who you are. I can’t tell you who to fall in love with. I just want to know if it’s safe. She’s your teacher. You’re the apprentice. Can you even have a relationship like that? And if you can’t, will you be okay?”

 

“I didn’t even start to…” I whispered.

 

She reached over and patted me on the arm. “You’ll figure it out. I know you will. Just be honest with yourself, Jaesa. All I want is the best for you.”

 

All I could do was say a quiet thank-you and leave for the guest room. I had…a lot to think about.

 

On the bright side, I spent so much time working through my feelings for Aly that I managed to completely forget about how horrible I’d thought the house was going to be. It wasn’t a good night’s sleep. But it was better than the alternative.

 

Edited by Euphrosyne
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Notes to Chapter VIII

 

A diapason is a semi-archaic musical term. I'm not a music person, so if I get this definition wrong, well, apologies in advance. But I've seen it used to denote a "scale", as in, the full range an instrument can play. And in this chapter, we sort of run the full gamut of emotions - fear, humor, despair, joy, anxiety, love, and so on - so I figured it'd be moderately appropriate. With that said, though, I've

similarly to "octave" or "harmonic". And given what becomes apparent at the end of this chapter, and what the conversations in the Citadel were about, I think that it's reasonable to describe the action here as having gone up a level.

 

This time, the quote's from Shaw. It has a bit of resonance with what Jaesa thinks about at the beginning of the chapter, but the idea is really at the base of most of what she does in this story, especially deciding to become Aly's apprentice and enter the belly of the beast, as it were. Because she couldn't live with herself if she were as indifferent to the plight of the people of the Empire as it seems most of the Jedi are.

 

Crichton's The Lost World framed my approach to the predators of Dromund Kaas's jungles. Really, the planet doesn't represent a balanced ecosystem at all. Obviously this is for gameplay reasons, and to frame the Sith throneworld as a ferocious place, but I thought it'd be amusing to apply my own very poor understanding of ecology to the place.

 

Yes, the "drouk" and "terror from beyond" bits are supposed to reference the Denova and Asation Operations, respectively. The krakana is a similarly gigantic sea creature native to Mon Calamari, named, of course, in homage to the kraken of Earth myth.

 

Since "War Trust" is an incredibly silly name, I gave the group a real title, culled from the excellent comedy In the Loop. In that movie, the American "

" is referred to, colloquially, as the "War Committee" - a bit of an unsubtle reference, but there it is. And it makes sense that a bunch of generals on the Strategic High Command would be in the business of war plans.

 

About a month or so ago, there was a discussion in the Story and Lore forum about the Sith style of teaching as compared to the Jedi style. I thought the Sith style of teaching was a load of crap and said so, and that sort of carried over to the writing here.

 

I know that the introduction to the "Call to Arms" quest happens on the Fleet, and that Malgus only appears by holo. This way's cooler, while being more or less faithful to the spirit of things. And I didn't feel like fitting a visit to Vaiken Spacedock in between the back and forth jaunting around the galaxy. And yes, by level, one wouldn't do Boarding Party/The Foundry until after Taris and after Quesh, respectively, but I saw a golden opportunity for something fairly crucial to this story, so I took it. Deal with it. :p

 

The quote Aly is referencing vis-a-vis Baras comes from the Roman biographer Cornelius Nepos' Excellentivm Imperatorvm Vitae, a quote I was directed to via Donald Kagan's four-part series on the Peloponnesian War. In his discussion of the Athenian general and politician Thrasyboulos (comparing him with a more famous contemporary, Alkibiades), Nepos stated: "Primvm Peloponnesio bello mvlta hic sine Alcibiade gessit, ille nvllam rem sine hoc; qvae ille universa naturali qvodam bono fecit lvcri." I believe that the translation goes something like this: "In the Peloponnesian War, he [Thrasyboulos] accomplished many victories without Alkibiades; the latter accomplished nothing without the former, yet he, by some gift of his nature, gained the credit for everything." Now, to be fair, Baras was quite a powerful Sith Lord before he gains the Sith Warrior's services, but the Warrior is still responsible for his ascension to the pinnacle of Imperial power and authority - and yet doesn't get the credit for any of that until Baras' defeat in the duel on Korriban at the end of Chapter 3.

 

Vette's running a crew skill mission. :rak_03:

 

Hey, an introduction to The Team! We'll be seeing more of them. I might even spin our Force walker off into a fanfic of her own. Oh, and since it obviously wouldn't make any sense for both Imps and Pubs to get to do all the flashpoints, I sort of split them up like so:

Imps: Black Talon, Athiss, Mandalorian Raiders, Boarding Party, the Foundry, Colicoid War Game, Battle of Ilum, False Emperor

Pubs: Esseles, Hammer Station, Cademimu, Taral V, Maelstrom Prison, Red Reaper, Directive 7, Kaon Under Siege, Lost Island

You might've noticed that I alluded to our Jedi Knight - Marade Sunflash, from my two stories in the Short Fic Weekly Challenge thread - being "part of the team" that defeated Bouris Ulgo back in Chapter II. Since the Tatooine and Alderaan main planet quests are also kind of mutually exclusive, I had the Imps discover the Czerka base and the Pubs storm Castle Panteer.

 

Jaesa's parents coming to DK and living there is so crazy. But, you know, it's the LS choice, and I didn't want to make that big of a change to the story, so I ended up trying to explain it rather than coming up with an alternative. It's still weird as hell, and Jaesa recognizes this and tries to bring it up, but...meh. It is what it is. I know that a DS Jaesa can mention that she was never really all that close to her parents, and while I think that's bleed-through from her being, you know, evil, I tried to accommodate that as best I could, both there and in Chapter II.

 

Since I'm a (transplanted) Louisiana girl, I couldn't resist feeding Jaesa some shrimp.

 

That bit about Force-sensitive people doing things with financial markets is sort of taken from James Luceno's Darth Plagueis - Plagueis being an extremely wealthy Muun with fingers in the InterGalactic Banking Clan and a zillion financial institutions across the galaxy, while moonlighting as, you know, a Dark Lord of the Sith.

 

---

 

And then there's the kicker. Jaesa's feelings for Aly.

 

I tried to foreshadow this where I could, without totally giving everything away. Stuff like that awkward "cheekbones" line in Chapter VII, for instance, or the "goddess of war" comments, or her reaction to Aly's story about her abuse. And it ought to be painfully clear from the way Aly's acted around Jaesa - well, really, from the way Aly's acted ever since she realized that Jaesa wasn't on her ship and Ulldin and Zylixx were there instead - that Aly feels something similar. So hopefully this hasn't come out of the blue for anybody.

 

In a roundabout way, this brings us to the title of the story, which I never really explained. "Beyond Good and Evil" comes from the title of a Friedrich Nietzsche work, Jenseits von Gut und Böse. But in that book, there's a section with a bunch of aphorisms, and my story's title is actually a reference to one of those aphorisms, not the title of the book itself. The aphorism goes like this: "Was aus Liebe gethan wird, geschieht immer jenseits von Gut und Böse." In English, that means, "What would be done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil." I couldn't very well give the game away by explaining that this was also a love story at the very beginning. That's an idea, by the way, that Jaesa will struggle with, return to, and eventually explain by the end of the story.

 

So yeah. One of the only same-gender romance stories in the entire fanfic forum. Wooo.

 

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Open question: what do you guys think of the notes posts? Do you read them, not read them, think they're pointless, think they're patronizing, think they're helpful, think they're funny...?

Keep it up! I love all the references, and since you're obviously more well-read than I am, I appreciate the chance to get some perspective and context, as well as add a few things to my already-oversized "to read" list. :D

 

A squee, eh? Thank you very much. :)

A squee indeed. I shall surely squee more later, given some of what is being setup. :p

 

Louisiana girl, eh? Shrimp? Now you've got me craving Cajun food. At frelling midnight! >.<

Edited by Adwynyth
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Keep it up! I love all the references, and since you're obviously more well-read than I am, I appreciate the chance to get some perspective and context, as well as add a few things to my already-oversized "to read" list. :D

 

 

A squee indeed. I shall surely squee more later, given some of what is being setup. :p

 

Louisiana girl, eh? Shrimp? Now you've got me craving Cajun food. At frelling midnight! >.<

Glad to hear it. I get anxious about silly stuff like that. It's what makes Jaesa so easy to write. ;)

 

And f'true, dawlin', I usedta stay by my mamma'n'em in St. Tammany Parish. You know how when a good ole boy moves up North he sometimes gets hisself a different accent, but when he gets ta drinkin', that Southern drawl (or twang) comes out? Well, for me, it's more like a weird mixture between German (where I was born) and Yat (from my childhood). This is why I am almost always the DD - people don't understand me if I start drinking. :(

 

Oh, and it's pronounced "s'rimp". No "sh". :D

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I'm enjoying this, as I did Sith in a Pretty Dress and some of the other fan fiction. First time actually commenting, and the comment has nothing to do with the writing (which is better than mine and I teach the blasted stuff).

 

I find the different views of the characters interesting. I've seen Jaesa portrayed as nobility from Alderaan (no idea how that happened; her parents are clearly servants), and Jaesa as crazy, and your view (Jaesa as strong). My own view of Jaesa is quite a bit different. Strong, yes, but insecure. I kept thinking about growing up as a servant to those nobles on Alderaan, most of whom are the worst kind of aristocrat, and how a talent like Jaesa's would be useful to someone who needed protection, who was constantly afraid, not officially a slave, but little better than one.

 

I also have a problem with Sith as so totally evil. I keep thinking that these people have been in charge of an empire for how many years? Sheer self interest would keep them, for the most part, from abusing their power, and I cannot imagine that a society with their entire family life based around murder and abuse would survive for long. I know the Lucas viewpoint, but I don't buy it. Too simplistic, and not very interesting.

 

Anyway, love what you're doing with Jaesa and I'm looking forward to more.

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I'm enjoying this, as I did Sith in a Pretty Dress and some of the other fan fiction. First time actually commenting, and the comment has nothing to do with the writing (which is better than mine and I teach the blasted stuff).

 

I find the different views of the characters interesting. I've seen Jaesa portrayed as nobility from Alderaan (no idea how that happened; her parents are clearly servants), and Jaesa as crazy, and your view (Jaesa as strong). My own view of Jaesa is quite a bit different. Strong, yes, but insecure. I kept thinking about growing up as a servant to those nobles on Alderaan, most of whom are the worst kind of aristocrat, and how a talent like Jaesa's would be useful to someone who needed protection, who was constantly afraid, not officially a slave, but little better than one.

 

I also have a problem with Sith as so totally evil. I keep thinking that these people have been in charge of an empire for how many years? Sheer self interest would keep them, for the most part, from abusing their power, and I cannot imagine that a society with their entire family life based around murder and abuse would survive for long. I know the Lucas viewpoint, but I don't buy it. Too simplistic, and not very interesting.

 

Anyway, love what you're doing with Jaesa and I'm looking forward to more.

Wow. Thanks. :D

 

I tend to agree with you about Jaesa's insecurity, to be honest - and I think that if it's not showing through in my writing I must be doing something wrong. :o For me, though, it's more a question of Jaesa's will than her belief in her own power. The game shows Jaesa as being unsure about the extent of her powers, believing that she can be 'tricked', and so on. That doesn't make any sense to me, because the very nature of her power is basically the ability to know someone as closely and fully as anyone possibly could. There isn't really room for uncertainty there.

 

Where I did try to make the insecurity come through is in combat, the morality of whether she should use her power at all, her mental fitness for the task of reforming the Empire from within, and, now, her relationship with Aly. I mean, from one point of view Jaesa's done very strong things, like switching sides, and being there for Aly when they talked about her past. But she also constantly rolls those things around in her head and if, not rethinks, at least doubts her decisions. For instance, in that fight back at the safehouse, she only killed one guy, after all, and that after the sort of internal dialogue that would have normally gotten herself killed instead.

 

As far as the evil Sith go, meh. So far we've only really seen a few of them, and of those, only Baras has had anything close to extended dialogue. Most of the creepy pure evil stuff that I've written for him is straight out of the game's dialogue itself. And as far as Ricimer went...well. The social relationships I brought up for the Sith Empire pretty much mirror the legal authority that heads of households have had in families around the world, from Kongzi and the Roman paterfamilias through the early twentieth century. States have historically given tacit license to their soldiers and their authority figures to rape, and sometimes, as in the case of Japan's "comfort women", this was institutionalized. This is really just the combination of those two ideas. I don't really think self-interest woud've been a deterrent at all, because most of the time, the victims just stayed (and stay) victims, which meant that there wasn't really any sort of cost (in the economic sense) to the perpetrator. After all, if you look at the history of power, more often than not you can call it a history of the abuse of power.

 

Now, I do want to point out that Aly's not exactly a rational, unbiased observer on this point. By her own admission, she saw the entire Empire as collaborating with her father (like when she was out in the jungle) when in reality she was probably exaggerating somewhat. But it was the Empire's social hierarchy that enabled that kind of behavior from a Sith Lord, and even if not every Sith who interacted with Ricimer engaged in his little prostitution ring or actively approved of what he was doing, they tacitly did. There's a point in there about the banality of evil, I think, and it's not exactly far-fetched to see parallels in RL human society. I'd argue that the Sith as portrayed in both the game and this particular story aren't really more evil than most human societies throughout history; they're just more ostentatious about it than most. (And not really more ostentatious about it than, say, the Nazis.) And if human society managed to avoid self-destruction over the course of the last several thousand years, well, it's not so unreasonable to think that the Sith could, too.

 

For what it's worth, the next chapter will make things seem...a bit more balanced in terms of "evil". I guarantee it.

Edited by Euphrosyne
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I'll agree with you about the patriarchy. The potential for abuse, institutionalized abuse, is there, but in most societies, that potential is subsumed in the need to nurture the next generation. But the Sith society seems contradictory in the game. At least, the Sith rulers have as many very powerful women as men, although it seems most of the Dark Council consists of men. I have to admit, I spend a lot of my time trying to reconcile the back story as I see it with the game itself, not very successfully at times. It's one reason I read the fan fiction, and one reason I write my own (not for publication--I write for my own pleasure). To me, the Jedi seem just as patriarchal, just as willing to impose their philosophy on others. The simplistic conflict between good and evil makes a good parable, but not a good story, at least by my standards. Character makes story, and that's why your writing works.

 

The insecurity part--I actually see Jaesa's insecurity in your story, but it's a different insecurity than what I see in her. (Which is what makes a lot of this so much fun--seeing how other people view their characters.) I don't want to influence your view of Jaesa, so I'll just say that as a servant and the child of servants, Jaesa was a dependent, unable to make her own choices, unable to protect herself, with parents who were also unable to protect her. I didn't see the general on Alderaan as her mentor but as her master (ok, mistress), and I saw Jaesa's ability to "read" others as a way of finding out what they think so she could protect herself from what they could do to her. She was, until Nomen Karr found her, essentially powerless, and Nomen Karr preferred her to stay that way, under his control.

 

Anyway, keep it up.

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And f'true, dawlin', I usedta stay by my mamma'n'em in St. Tammany Parish. You know how when a good ole boy moves up North he sometimes gets hisself a different accent, but when he gets ta drinkin', that Southern drawl (or twang) comes out? Well, for me, it's more like a weird mixture between German (where I was born) and Yat (from my childhood). This is why I am almost always the DD - people don't understand me if I start drinking. :(

So you're saying I have to get you drunk if I want to hear that accent? :D

 

Oh, and it's pronounced "s'rimp". No "sh". :D

Ah, thankee. If you need to know how anything in Arizona is properly pronounced (most likely Spanish-derived stuff), I'll happily reciprocate. :p

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I'm enjoying this, as I did Sith in a Pretty Dress and some of the other fan fiction.

Ooo...thankee. :p Didn't expect to find praise for something of mine in someone else's thread. I appreciate it.

 

I'll get crack-a-lackin' on more shenanigans. :D

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Open question: what do you guys think of the notes posts? Do you read them, not read them, think they're pointless, think they're patronizing, think they're helpful, think they're funny...?

 

Because a significant chunk of the reasoning behind them is to inform the readers, of course. But there's also another angle. I'm kind of treating this like an academic history paper in that I want to cite my sources. If I get an idea or a quote or the general tenor of a scene from someplace else, I feel compelled to give notice of that..

 

Keep it up! I love all the references, and since you're obviously more well-read than I am, I appreciate the chance to get some perspective and context, as well as add a few things to my already-oversized "to read" list. :D

 

*lazily steals Adwynyth's response as well as the popcorn* This :D

 

And I did see the Jaesa/Aly thing coming *smirks*

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Apocalypse

 

Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Sprüche und Zwischenspiele 146

 

 

Getting to see my parents again was nice. More than nice. But as our ship streaked back into hyperspace the next day, I found myself idly complaining. We’d just come from Hutta. To get to Lannik space from Dromund Kaas, we’d basically be retracing our steps.

 

When I offhandedly brought this up to Quinn, he told me that it wasn’t actually true, and that the trip would technically be shorter even though we were going a longer distance because we could use the Perlemian Trade Route to get to Lantillies, and follow well-worn hyperroutes from there, instead of making do with the backwater poorly-traveled Hutt spacelanes. Didn’t really resonate with me. I couldn’t totally wrap my head around the idea of being able to get somewhere faster by taking a longer route, especially in hyperspace, where you didn’t have to deal with things like “traffic”.

 

But, you know, I knew that I didn’t understand much about hyperspatial physics or astronavigation. I figured I was probably wrong, but it still seemed weird.

 

I guess I was also a bit high-strung because of that last talk with my mom.

 

It wasn’t very difficult for everybody else on the ship to notice that I was acting weirder after the visit to Dromund Kaas. Aly didn’t say anything about it, though. Maybe she didn’t really know what was going on, or thought that if there were really a problem I’d tell her about it, like I had with everything else. So we’d spar, or talk philosophy and history, or work on conditioning, or do those little mental exercises that help people better control their Force powers, without many external signs that something was amiss.

 

I felt pretty intensely awkward the whole time, though.

 

Vette, on the other hand, didn’t see things quite that way. She noticed, and she took it upon herself to try to fix the problem. The ship was a few days out from Sith space and we’d just finished watching a holodrama in her room, a new take on an old Anaxsi myth about a wandering hero and the trials and tribulations he endured on his journey home from war. As the credits rolled, I sat back in the chair I’d appropriated.

 

“That was a pretty good flick,” I ventured.

 

Vette was lying on her bed, legs kicked back in the air, head propped on her hands. “Yeah, I thought so. A lot funnier than I expected. ‘Is you is, or is you ain’t, my constituency?’ Classic.”

 

Then she abruptly changed tack. “So, what’s eating you?”

 

“Huh?”

 

She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. You’re even mopier than you were when we picked you up on Hutta. So talk it out. What’s the problem?”

 

“…Do you promise you won’t tell anybody?” I asked hesitantly.

 

“Why?”

 

“I…um. Because I’m worried about what people…what somebody…will think about me if it comes out.”

 

“Well, don’t worry about it,” she said. “Even if you confess that you’ve been writing secret love poetry to Captain Pasty, I won’t laugh.”

 

I scrunched up my face in my best impersonation of a scowl.

 

Vette looked taken aback. “…Wait, you haven’t actually been doing that, have you?”

 

“Well, no. Not Quinn.”

 

Light dawned. “You have a thing for Aly?”

 

I nodded miserably.

 

“Jaesa, I was just joking when I said that thing about rubbing off,” she said.

 

Her expression slowly changed as she realized how serious I was. Sympathy and confusion started to have a fight for control of her face.

 

Confusion won. “Uh, so how is this a problem? She really, really likes you. You both have that magic Force powers thing going. Where’s the issue? Are you worried about her not liking you back? Because if you are, hah, you really don’t know anything about her.”

 

“No,” I said, “I’m not worried about that. I’m worried about if she does like me.”

 

Her brow furrowed. “You lost me.”

 

“For a Jedi, love can be really dangerous. Attachment…being too attached to something, unwilling to let it go…is a short path to the dark side. And then there’s, you know, the whole teacher thing. She’s in a position of authority over me. Can I separate that from my feelings about her? I just don’t know.”

 

“That’s a weird way to put it,” she said.

 

Her “weird way to put it” was one of the key tenets of the Jedi Order. “Huh?”

 

“Well, you know, first things first, you’re not a Jedi anymore. Why act like a monk if you’re not a monk?”

 

“Don’t remind me,” I said heavily.

 

“Sorry, but it’s true. And second, I don’t get this whole Attachment Is Bad thing. Almost everybody in the galaxy can love somebody else without, you know, killing children because of them, or something else awful and Sithy. It’s just Jedi that have that weird hangup.”

 

“But it’s not that simple…”

 

“Why not? Okay, so you love Aly. Which is totally cool, by the way. But you also have lines you won’t cross, right? You’re not going to, like, sic an evil Wookiee on a certain cute blue Twi’lek or rig up a new slave collar on her or anything.”

 

I laughed. “I sure hope not.”

 

“So don’t cross the lines! Where’s the problem?”

 

“You make it sound so simple,” I grumbled.

 

“It is! It is that simple. Loving somebody else doesn’t mean that you’d do horrible things ‘for’ them.”

 

Something about the way she’d done the air quotes there put a silly little smile on my face, and we both laughed.

 

She rolled off the bed and stood up. “I’m not going to tell anybody about this. But you should.”

 

“When did you get to be the Wise and All-Knowing Vette, Dispenser of Pearls of Wisdom anyway?” I asked jokingly. “Out of the mouths of…”

 

Vette held up her finger. “Finish that saying and I’ll, uh, I’ll…do something bad. But seriously, you know, I’ve been around. Some pretty bad things have happened to me. And some pretty awesome things have happened to me, too. You gotta learn to look things in the eye. All this moaning about how complicated things are and how awful the galaxy is, that’s just stupid. You’re just making up reasons to feel miserable.”

 

“Like when Aly was trying to talk to me…” I breathed.

 

“Yeah! Just like that,” she said approvingly. “But you didn’t say you were going to tell her.”

 

I held up my hands. “I’ll…I will. This is just a big deal for me.”

 

“I don’t like the sound of that,” she grumbled, arms folded.

 

“Look. I promise I’ll tell Aly that I…” My voice caught in my throat. “…that I love her. And I’ll do it soon. Just…not right now, okay?

 

She left it at that.

 

A day later, we arrived at the fleet rendezvous in Lannik space, and I still hadn’t said Word One to Aly about how I felt. If I were to be honest with myself, I’d say that it was because I was still finding excuses to put it off until the Foundry operation made it more or less impossible for the time being.

 

Darth Malgus had mentioned a thirty-ship fleet, so I’d been kind of interested in seeing all of those war machines in one place. Military stuff wasn’t my thing, but thirty capital ships seemed like it’d be awe-inspiring no matter what you were interested in. So when our Fury decanted from hyperspace, I crowded into the cockpit with Quinn and Aly to get a glimpse of the mighty Imperial battle fleet.

 

I was kind of disappointed. All I could see was Dorajan itself. No flotilla of doom.

 

“Uh, Captain? Master? Where’s the fleet?”

 

Aly giggled.

 

“Begging milady’s pardon,” lectured Quinn, “but the vessels are far beyond visual range, to the amount of several thousand kilometers. You could not hope to see anything at that distance smaller than a dwarf planet.” He keyed up a sensor display showing a small cluster of dots about halfway between us and the planet and unnecessarily highlighted them with his finger.

 

“We can’t get pinpoint accuracy with hyperspace travel,” Aly added. “And if you were expecting some grand show when we do get to the fleet, you’re going to be disappointed. A lot of the ships are spread out enough that you won’t be able to see them from the White Nova, either.”

 

“You two are destroying some cherished holodrama notions,” I groused.

 

She laughed. “Well, I’ll be fair. In an actual battle, ships can get pretty close to each other for various reasons. It happens a lot, actually. But there’s no reason to bunch up here. It’s not like we’re signaling orders to each other with color-coded flags. And we don’t need to look good for the cameras.”

 

I’d been a little disappointed with the lack of spectacle, but as we got closer to the White Nova, that disappointment faded pretty quickly. The ship was enormous, nearly a kilometer long. Looking up at it from close range gave me the same oppressive feeling as I had gotten from the Citadel on Dromund Kaas. It was pretty obviously meant to symbolize the titanic might of the Empire as much as it served as a war machine.

 

Okay, I didn’t need to see thirty ships. One was more than enough.

 

We were greeted by an honor guard of Imperial troopers and naval officers in serried ranks as we left the ship. Moff Phennir himself didn’t grace us with his presence, but a different officer with impressive-looking rank plaques and shoulder boards met us instead. He didn’t try much small talk as he escorted us through the ship’s corridors. I got the feeling that even being in the same room as Sith was enough to make him wet himself. Not that that was an unreasonable reaction.

 

Since, according to the officer, not all of the members of the team had arrived, we were going to wait in the wardroom, where refreshments had been laid out for us. When we got there, I sort of naturally gravitated toward the table with the spread on it, although I wasn’t even hungry. Most of it was pretty normal stuff, with sandwiches, various meats and fruits, and soup. But it was sort of jarring to see the plate of cookies that the Imps had left out for the Sith.

 

Aly ignored the table altogether and immediately made tracks for a booth in the corner. I awkwardly abandoned the refreshments table and did a silly sort of half-fast-walk to try to catch up. As we approached, both of the occupants of the table stood up.

 

“Hey there, Blue!” Aly called out cheerfully.

 

“Blue” was a Chiss woman, about as tall as I was, with jet-black hair tied back in a high ponytail, those strangely beautiful red glowing eyes, and, of course, unmistakably-Chiss dark blue skin. She wore a tight-fitting gray combat suit, pants, and boots, with a mean-looking pistol holstered at her right thigh. Initially, her oval-shaped face looked almost blank, completely inscrutable, but then she smiled happily and returned the greeting in clipped, precise tones.

 

“It’s nice to see you again, Red. Has it been three weeks already?”

 

“You’re kidding me. I feel like it’s been aaaaages since Alderaan,” she said.

 

“Blue” kept up her little smirk. “What, you missed me that much?”

 

“Nah,” said Aly. “It’s just…big changes. I kind of dueled a Jedi Master, picked up an apprentice, and got made a full Sith Lady.”

 

“Congratulations,” the other said warmly.

 

“Speaking of which: Jaesa, this is Cipher Nine, the best shot in the galaxy and one of the few useful Intelligence pukes, and that’s her boy toy, Vector Hyllus. Guys, this is my new apprentice, Jaesa Willsaam, late of the Jedi Order.”

 

I won’t pretend that I didn’t feel a little flutter when Aly described Vector as Cipher’s “boy toy”, especially after seeing how happy she and Aly had been to see each other.

 

She inclined her head. “It’s an honor, milady.”

 

“Likewise,” I said with a nervous smile. “But if you’re informal with my Master, you’re more than welcome to be informal with me.”

 

The agent’s brow twitched upward fractionally. It was a pretty small gesture, but in the Force, I could feel her relax. “You’re much more like Red than any other Sith I’ve met.”

 

“Is that a bad thing?”

 

“Of course not,” she laughed.

 

Vector stepped forward, and I finally got a decent look at him: a tall man in diplomat’s robes, with slicked-back hair, and chiseled, attractive features, and…

 

Oh.

 

He was a Joiner.

 

My greeting died on my lips.

 

Alderaan is home both to humans and to nests of a large insectoid species, the Killiks. Ever since the end of the Great War, a lot of Killik nests had been coming out of hibernation, and with Alderaan’s humans in civil war with each other, Killiks were free to rampage across the countryside. I never saw any of it firsthand, living at Castle Organa, but I heard of the atrocities the Killik nests perpetuated all the time.

 

Arguably the worst part about the Killiks wasn’t that they butchered and ate people. It was that they never made peace. Wars with Killiks were wars to the knife, campaigns of extermination. They had to be. Every time a human embassy would try to make contact with them, they would be absorbed into the hive mind as Joiners. Their individuality would be gone, and they would just be servants of the nest. And the war would continue.

 

And the thing about Joiners: they’ve got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes.

 

Vector’s eyes.

 

He didn’t do a very good job of acting human, either. He moved awkwardly, from his gait to his bow. Even his smile was painfully affected, like he was trying to remember how to do it but didn’t get it totally right.

 

“We are honored to make your acquaintance,” he said in a creepy singsong voice.

 

My lip quivered, but I eventually managed to force a smile onto my lips. “Hi.”

 

“Vector,” said Cipher, “is a member of the Diplomatic Service, seconded to Intelligence following his previous assignment, liaising with the Oroboro Killik nest. Now he’s…um, what was that title again?”

 

“We are proud to be the Oroboro Dawn Herald: confronter of the unknown and revitalizer of the nest.”

 

“Proud?” I asked. “I thought Joiners didn’t retain their individuality.”

 

“As Dawn Herald, we must frequently be away from the nest. The Song of the Universe cannot always be heard with clarity, far from the nest-caves and membrosia pools. Because of this, we retain…some of our individuality.”

 

“I see,” I lied.

 

Aly stepped in. “So, Blue, what’ve you been up to over the last few weeks?”

 

“I can tell you that I broke up a terrorist attack that threatened to kill millions on several Imperial worlds,” she said offhandedly.

 

“Top Trumps, huh? There wasn’t any Jedi Master running that terrorist group, was there?”

 

It made me a little uncomfortable that Aly could suggest that a Jedi Master could be masterminding a terrorist organization so casually. Then again, given how little I knew about what spies like Ardun Kothe and my erstwhile Master actually did, and how cavalierly my former Master had treated the Jedi Code, they very well could’ve orchestrated terror attacks against Imperial targets.

 

I didn’t really want to think about that too deeply.

 

“No,” said Cipher expressionlessly, “there wasn’t.”

 

“Well then, I guess I still win,” said Aly smugly.

 

“I guess you do.”

 

Aly gave her a weird look, but plunged ahead anyway. “How much do you know about this Foundry stuff?”

 

She shrugged. “Not that much, really. My orders were passed to me through Intelligence, and you know how they are about ‘need-to-know’. Once I got past all the obfuscation, all that was really left was imminent threat, escaped Jedi Master, Dorajan system.”

 

“Same here,” Aly mused. “Normally, Malgus would tell us more about an op. We didn’t hit Athiss or the Allusis blind.”

 

“Well. Whatever this is, it’s probably tied into whatever happened in the Maelstrom Nebula a few weeks ago.”

 

Aly did her characteristic eyebrow-ridge raise. “What thing? And how d’you figure?”

 

“You didn’t hear?” said the agent. “Kilran’s Fifth Fleet took it on the chin from an outnumbered Republic fleet out there. He’s dead, and the Fifth barely limped back to Ord Trasi intact.”

 

“That ugly old scumsucker’s really dead? Figures. He never was much good for anything unless he had help from us.”

 

Cipher took up a severe tone. “That’s not entirely fair.”

 

“Fine, fine,” responded Aly. “Us or Malgus. Besides, you’re totally a better shot than he was.”

 

The Chiss woman smirked. “This is true.”

 

“You mynock. Anyway, how’s this got anything to do with the Foundry?”

 

“It’s all tied together. Malgus and the Expeditionary Fleet are shipping up to the Veragi sector, right next door to the Maelstrom. Did he give you the same song-and-dance about the Gree that the Minister gave me?”

 

“Yeah,” nodded Aly. “I thought all this Enclave stuff was pretty overblown. Magic tech and all that nonsense. Whatever. It’s not like they actually do anything.”

 

“Well, Reason Aurek for Malgus going up there has got to be covering for Fifth Fleet being mauled. And when he sends a task force to deal with this Foundry stuff at the same time…”

 

My Master finished the sentence. “…It looks like they’re part of the same problem. Still, you might be connecting the wrong dots. ‘If we had some bruallki, we could have bruallki and Menkooro…’”

 

“Yes, yes. ‘If we had some Menkooro.’ I suppose we’ll have to wait for the briefing.”

 

As it turned out, we didn’t have to wait very long. The Grand Champion came in a few minutes later, accompanied by a tiny woman in a sleek jumpsuit that I assumed was his girlfriend-partner Mako. Majnun himself, a hulking man nearly as tall and powerfully built as Malgus, wore the same bulky all-purpose body armor that any Mandalorian would. But when he deigned to take off his helmet, I saw that he wasn’t just ‘any Mandalorian’: his face had the tattooed, hairless look of the mysterious Rattataki, and his cold gray eyes made me squirm.

 

The bounty hunters weren’t particularly social, but Aly’s sorceress friend was. Dressed in a simple black robe and accompanied by a bald, rugged, dark-skinned man, Sakaria came in shortly after Majnun did and offered her greetings to everybody. Aly’d told me she had been a slave, but I was still surprised to see a Sith who wasn’t human or red-skinned. Everything about her body looked human, sure. But I couldn’t see her eyes, hidden by a purple veil fastened around her brow, and it took me a few seconds to realize why. I’d seen her species before, on Tython: she was a Miraluka, the eyeless near-humans that ‘saw’ with the Force.

 

Sakaria clearly wasn’t all the way there when we were being introduced; I caught snippets of a conversation about Dark Council squabbling but wasn’t really paying close enough attention to tell. And while her body language showed no real sign of stress, I barely had to reach into the Force at all to pick up a deep sense of depression and melancholia coming off of her. When she finally managed to make her way to Aly again, they traded a few words that I couldn’t really hear, and then she collapsed onto Aly’s shoulder, just shivering and mumbling incoherently. I could hear Aly whispering some quiet, soothing words, but then we were all called into the briefing room, and she got cut off.

 

As we walked down the corridor, I asked Aly what the deal was, and her expression softened. “Saki…well, she’s going through a pretty rough time right now. I kinda feel like her sister, you know? Like I need to watch out for her.”

 

I’m not too proud to admit that my heart leapt when I heard the word “sister”, but I wasn’t so much of an ingrate that I completely glossed over everything else. “Is there anything, uh, I can do? Or is this more of a personal thing?”

 

She bit her lip. “I dunno. She’s a sorceress. Her enemies tend to do their fighting with weird Force rituals and spells. Zapping stuff with lightning, that sort of thing. It’s not really my fight; I tend to solve problems with my fists. And since she doesn’t really know you, I doubt you’d be able to do anything about her, uh, emotional trauma. I think she just needs time.”

 

My gaze flicked over to the Miraluka again. “It’s hard to see somebody that sad and not be able to do anything about it. And it’s dangerous for a powerful Force user to be an emotional wreck.”

 

“Yeah, well, you and I know all about that last one, right?” she said drily. “I think she’ll be okay. I trust her to come to me if she thinks she’s losing control.”

 

We shuffled into the briefing room, with some of the members of the group still making some small talk. When a contingent of Imperial naval officers tromped up to the front, though, everybody quieted down and took their seats. Then, the officer with the snazziest-looking uniform, a flame-haired man with a fuzzy little mustache, mounted the podium.

 

“Miladies, honored servants and allies of the Empire, my name is Moff Phennir, and I am the commander of this task force. It’s an honor to commit myself and my fleet to this cause.”

 

As he rolled through the niceties, Aly whispered to me. “Funny. Moffs don’t usually give briefings. They’re keeping this one close to the chest – I doubt most of the other officers know what’s really going on, either.”

 

“Our mission is simple,” continued Phennir, “but in no way easy. Our objective is to destroy or capture an ancient alien space station, the Foundry, recently seized by Republic and Jedi forces. These forces are believed to be led by a Jedi Master, the same one who escaped the Emperor’s prison in the Maelstrom Nebula two weeks ago.”

 

From the seats in front of us, Cipher Nine turned around and mouthed, “Called it.”

 

“We are still not aware of the full capabilities of this space station, but as the name implies, the Foundry is at the very least a massive arms factory. It could fuel a Republic offensive into the heart of Imperial space. Under the control of this Jedi Master, it represents a clear and present danger to Imperial security, and we have been tasked with its neutralization.”

 

Mako whispered something to Majnun, and he raised a hand. “You said this thing was alien. What kind we talking about here? Gree?”

 

“A pertinent question. The Foundry appears to be a Rakata space station, with advanced technology similar to that unearthed on Tatooine by the Reclamation Service three months ago. Unfortunately, external design and artistic motifs are all we have to go on. Reconnaissance efforts in the Nanth’ri system have been largely stymied by the Republic fleet on guard there.

 

“You have been selected for this mission because we have deemed a purely space naval assault to be overly costly, with a low chance of success. The Foundry possesses considerable native defenses, and is defended by a Republic fleet with approximate numerical parity to our own.

 

“Instead, we will capture one of the Republic Thranta-class corvettes carrying troops and supplies to and from the Foundry, and use it to insert your strike team onto the Foundry. This task force will follow and support your attack. Your objective will be to eliminate Republic and Jedi opposition, neutralize the Foundry’s defenses, and seize control of its factories. If you encounter the Jedi Master, you are permitted to eliminate him. Capture is unnecessary.”

 

“Seems to me,” drawled Aly, “like we’re getting ahead of ourselves. What about this corvette?”

 

“Yes, milady. We have identified the route of one of the vessels carrying supplies to the Foundry from the Republic depot on Daalang. Most of the Republic vessels observed have attempted to randomize their jump sequences and vectors, but the captain of this one, the Dorin’s Sky, frequently skirts these protocols in a predictable way. Given the early arrivals of most of the strike force, we will be prepared to interdict the Dorin’s Sky and initiate boarding operations in approximately two standard hours.

 

“We have created a virtual mockup of the interior of a Thranta-class warship if any of you desires extra practice or is unfamiliar with the design, but otherwise, be prepared to launch in a boarding craft from Hangar Cresh fifteen minutes prior to interdiction.

 

“Are there any further questions?”

 

“What do we know about the opposition on board the Dorin’s Sky?” asked Cipher. “Standard corvette security complement?”

 

Phennir straightened. “According to assets on Daalang, the normal company of marines has been augmented by a crack squad of Regular Army commandos and a team of Jedi Knights. They were unable to discover anything further, but you should be prepared for some hard fighting.”

 

Then Sakaria spoke up. It was hard to hear her low voice, even with the room as quiet as it was. “What about the Treaty of Coruscant? Aren’t we supposedly at peace?”

 

“The seizure of the Foundry was immediately preceded by a Republic assault on an Imperial research outpost and a subsequent major fleet battle in the Maelstrom Nebula, milady. This action can plausibly be argued to be both retribution and a preemptive defense. By consensus decision of the Dark Council, if peace talks are to resume, the Foundry must be eliminated from the table as a Republic bargaining chip.”

 

Aly snorted. “The Dark Council can’t get a consensus on what day it is. Malgus is making policy again, isn’t he?”

 

The Moff shrugged nonchalantly. “Milady, I’m not at liberty to discuss Sith politics. I follow the orders I’m given.”

 

“As do we all,” she murmured. “Any word on who this Jedi Master actually is? A name would be nice.”

 

“I…don’t believe I’m at liberty to discuss that information,” Phennir replied nervously.

 

“That’s annoying. Oh, well. We good?”

 

There was general agreement throughout the room, and the meeting broke up.

 

I didn’t have a whole lot to do over the next few hours. Since I was a Sith, technically they couldn’t stop me from being on the bridge or wherever else I wanted to go, but I couldn’t imagine what to do up there or why to go. Aly was off doing her physical prep and simulation run-through stuff, which meant I couldn’t spend time with her. So I ended up back in the wardroom, nursing a non-alcoholic drink and picking at a plate of food.

 

It seemed like that’s where most of the strike team’s other hangers-on had gone, too. Vette had struck up a conversation with that bald man who came in with Lady Sakaria over a few glasses of Corellian Reserve. Mako was off in a corner, fiddling with her implants. The Joiner was in a corner, too, swaying weirdly as though he were dancing to music inside his head. And there was a Devaronian that I hadn’t seen before, who’d annexed a whole table, put his feet up, and dozed off.

 

Aly’s earlier injunction to make friends had been bouncing around in my head for awhile, but I was, to put things lightly, kind of a shy person. But something else had gotten stuck in there, too. I’d been pretty standoffish to Vector. And while I didn’t say anything overly awful, I was definitely thinking it. Never mind what Killiks did to people on Alderaan. What he’d said earlier about individuality…well, maybe I didn’t have to deal with him as a Joiner, or a member of a nest. And he did look awfully lonely sitting there in the corner, moving around as though he were in the throes of a seizure.

 

So I picked up my plate and glass and headed across the wardroom.

 

He didn’t really seem like he noticed me as I drew up to him, so I cleared my throat. “Um. Hey, Vector. Mind if I sit down here?”

 

“We would be honored to have you, milady.”

 

I smiled and plopped down on the seat in front of him. “You know, you don’t have to call me ‘milady’. Just stick with ‘Jaesa’.”

 

He cocked his head. “We apologize. We did not mean to offend.”

 

“Nah, it’s fine,” I said. “Actually, that’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.”

 

“How do you mean?”

 

I fidgeted a bit. “Well, I wasn’t exactly nice to you earlier. I’m from Alderaan, so…I have a lot of baggage about Killiks. It wasn’t fair of me to tar you with the same brush.”

 

He shrugged, a gesture of humanity that made me smile. “It was not entirely unfair, either. We are of the nest. And we know of the things that we, and other Killik nests, have done, so we understand your concern. While on Alderaan, the nest attempted to relocate to a human estate as a new home. Cipher opposed this. And we sided with her.”

 

“That must have been difficult,” I said, my mouth dry.

 

“Yes. We joined the nest to make peace between Killiks and humans. Killing humans and taking their land was wrong. We would not be a very good diplomat if we facilitated more war.”

 

“You still talk about yourself like you’re part of the nest, though, even after you fought.”

 

“We stopped the nest from taking over House Cortess to help the nest,” Vector replied. “And now that dispute is over and done with. We will always work for the benefit of the nest. That is part of why we possess more individuality: to help show the nest the correct path.”

 

“It sounds like a pretty big responsibility. There’s a lot of power to abuse. Besides, what if the nest is right and you’re wrong?” I pointed out.

 

“Then it is up to us to recognize that,” he said. “We are glad to have Cipher’s help with these…sorts of things. We are not sure what we would have done on Alderaan without her.”

 

“Yeah,” I said wistfully. “Friends make all this stuff a lot easier.”

 

“Forgive our impertinence, but it sounds as though you have a similar dilemma, Jaesa.”

 

Oops. “Um. Not really. But I can see where you’re coming from.”

 

That slip shook me up a bit, so I excused myself after a few more minutes of mindless small talk and went over to a corner booth to continue not eating or drinking. Not to belabor the point, but if I almost revealed my mission in casual conversation with a random diplomat, I was an even worse secret agent than I’d thought.

 

What I did next, though, was just as bad: I dozed off.

 

It was the general-quarters alarm that forced my eyes back open. At first I’d thought that the ship was being boarded, but after I shook myself fully awake and scanned the wardroom with bleary eyes I realized that we’d “just” entered combat. No big deal.

 

Most of the people that’d been in the wardroom were still there, carrying on as usual. Vette and that bald guy were both passed out in their chairs, and the Devaronian was still off in dreamland, but Vector and Mako were still up and doing whatever it was they were doing. A few Imperial officers had apparently gone into the wardroom to grab a bite before the fight – har – but with general quarters sounding, they had bolted for whatever duty stations they had.

 

Needless to say, I felt pretty guilty about falling asleep. And although I intellectually knew that I couldn’t influence the battle from the bridge any more than I could in the wardroom, I still wanted to feel as though I weren’t being utterly useless.

 

Probably a newbie thing.

 

I’d heard people describe the bridge of a warship in combat as “organized chaos”, but that hadn’t really meant anything to me before I stepped out of the elevator from the wardroom. People were moving everywhere very quickly, there were reports being made all over the place, readouts were flickering crazily…but everybody was relatively quiet, except for Moff Phennir, and even he was at least calm.

 

I spotted Quinn off to one side and made a beeline for him.

 

“Hey, Captain,” I panted. “What’s happening?”

 

He proffered a datapad. “We’ve reached the Nanth’ri system about three minutes behind the Dorin’s Sky, milady. The strike team is already making their way into the Foundry’s outer defenses. They appear to have cracked the outer shell of Republic troops and are now engaging a veritable army of droids.”

 

“Droids?”

 

“Yes, milady. Apparently the station’s primary function is as a war droid foundry. The extermination droids encountered so far have been of a somewhat esoteric design and possess unique capabilities. However, the strike team is forging ahead.”

 

I felt incredibly guilty that I hadn’t been there to say goodbye to Aly before she’d left. What if she didn’t make it?

 

What if I never told her how I felt about her before she died?

 

“Meanwhile,” he added, “we have begun the fleet battle.”

 

“What’s the scoop there?” I asked, more calmly than I felt.

 

Quinn led me over to a tactical holodisplay. “The Republic commander is taking few chances. Initially, he drew up his fleet to engage us point-blank upon emerging from hyperspace, but after a period of initial skirmishing the enemy pulled back within range of the Foundry’s defenses.”

 

“I thought that the fleet guys had decided it’d be suicidal to try to fight the Foundry and the Republic fleet at the same time.”

 

“It will not be easy. Unfortunately, it is also necessary, to provide cover for the strike team. In the interim, starfighter carriers will attempt to suppress the Foundry’s defenses, while our battle squadrons engage those of the enemy.”

 

His finger circled a cloud of small pips sweeping through the Foundry’s outermost cordon, past a docked Thranta-class corvette that I assumed had to be the Dorin’s Sky.

 

I folded my arms. “You’d think that little fighters wouldn’t do much harm to a whole asteroid.”

 

“They won’t need to, milady. The fighters are there to distract the Foundry’s ground-based weaponry and knock out what they can. We believe that the Foundry’s defenses are optimized for use against capital ships, not speedy snubfighters. They should be able to sustain this for some time. This will prevent the Foundry from supporting the Republic battle line and give our destroyers a solid chance.”

 

On the display, the leading Imperial destroyers were coming into range of the Republic battle fleet. Far ahead of the White Nova’s prow, I could see tiny flickers of light among the stars.

 

“Why’s Phennir sending the battle line between the Foundry and the enemy fleet? Won’t they be surrounded that way?”

 

“Actually, milady, it’s the best way to make maximally effective use of our destroyers’ weapons. Destroyers carry turbolasers in banks along both lateral trenches. If they only had enemies to one side of them, half of the destroyers’ guns would be silent. Furthermore, we expect that both the fleet and the Foundry will be more constrained in their attacks, so as to avoid fratricide.”

 

My mouth twitched. “Still seems like we don’t have enough ships.”

 

He shrugged. “We do what we can.”

 

On the display, one of the leading destroyers flickered red and started drifting off-course. “That doesn’t look good.”

 

“It’s not crippled yet, milady. Besides,” Quinn pointed out, “one of the Republic Valor-class cruisers is about to break in half.”

 

I wondered what the crew complements of these vessels were. On the holo, the whole battle looked almost benign, like a game rather than a swirling inferno of death and destruction. It made it all too easy to forget what it meant for a Republic cruiser to break in half, or an Imperial destroyer to lose power and start to drift off course: a lot of people dead or dying.

 

The White Nova’s deck started to shiver underneath us as the Republic fleet started throwing long-range fire at us. Some of our own forward guns had already begun to take potshots at tiny specks in the distance. I could see a few Republic starfighters shoot across the bow, tracked by turbolaser fire that was just a few split seconds too slow.

 

“I guess that’s the downside of using the fighters against the Foundry, huh?”

 

“Mm? Oh. Yes, milady. However, most of the Republic fighters seem to be heading to the Foundry for defensive purposes. They’re not getting many shots in at our battle line.”

 

The Republic fleet was starting to get very big through the forward viewports. It still felt indescribably wrong to be here, sitting on the bridge of a warship engaging the Republic Navy, regardless of what Aly and Vector had told me. Ugh.

 

We started to draw alongside one of the Valors, approaching at an eccentric angle to avoid the cruiser’s equatorial turrets. Heavy broadsides slammed into the Republic ship’s engine pods. On the display, I could see the ship’s deflectors begin to flicker.

 

But then, a corvette shot in under the cruiser and began to open up with its twin turbolasers against the White Nova’s gun banks, trying to silence as many batteries as it could. The Imperial gunners deftly switched targets and raked the Thranta with ion cannon and laser fire. I heard Phennir call out an order, and within seconds, a flight of interceptors shifted over from attacking the Foundry’s defenses and slashed in at the Thranta’s engines. Several explosions rocked the smaller ship, and most of its running lights went dark.

 

Even if White Nova was making a good fight of it, a lot of the other Imperial ships were overmatched. I watched one destroyer absorb fire from three corvettes and a cruiser, causing a massive explosion that obliterated the destroyer and sent one of the corvettes spinning crazily away. Another destroyer, with half its superstructure blown off, rammed a Valor head-on, separating the cruiser from its engine pods and shattering the destroyer beyond all recognition. The Imps were giving as good as they got, but there just weren’t enough of them. On the display, I could see a lot more red dots than blue ones.

 

Suddenly, the Republic fleet started to drift apart, disengaging from the Imperial task force. I furrowed my brow, clueless as to why the net wasn’t closing anymore – until turbolaser shots from the Foundry started to slam into the flanks of the fleeing Republic ships. A cheer went up from the entire bridge crew. Even Quinn cracked a smile.

 

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Phennir run to a holoprojector and say a few unintelligible words to Aly and the team. I could hear the sound of her voice, although I couldn’t tell what she was saying. It didn’t matter. The awful feeling in the pit of my stomach had vanished. At least she’s alive. And through the forward viewports, I could see a flicker of pseudomotion as the last Republic ship fled the system.

 

I rushed to the elevator from the hangar bay when her shuttle arrived, but she brushed past me with barely an acknowledgment and strode up to Phennir.

 

“Moff,” she growled murderously.

 

His jaw dropped. “Milady?”

 

“You. Me. Malgus. Your office. Now. Make it happen.”

 

He composed himself. “Right away, milady.”

 

As he hurried off, I turned to Aly. “Master, do you want me to come, too?”

 

Her face softened. “Yeah. Sure. You might as well hear this. Quinn?”

 

“Yes, milady?”

 

“Go get Vette and get her settled aboard the ship. I want us ready to leave for Vaiken Spacedock in half an hour.”

 

“Of course, milady.”

 

She turned back to me. “Time to get an explanation for this.”

 

“Explanation for what?” I asked.

 

“You’ll see,” she shot back as we beat feet for the admiral’s quarters.

 

Even on the holoprojector in Phennir’s office, at half size, Darth Malgus still looked terrifying.

 

“Report.”

 

“The battle is won, my lord. The Foundry is ours,” said the Moff hesitantly.

 

The dark lord settled back with obvious satisfaction and turned toward Aly. “And it shall be a fine weapon, once wielded properly. This is how the Empire shall prevail: not only through superior armament, but through superior individuals. No other Sith could have struck such a blow or defeated the heretic Revan.”

 

Wait, what? Revan? The hero of the Civil War from three hundred years ago? He’s alive?

 

Was alive?

 

“You could have told me who the Foundry’s master really was,” snarled Aly.

 

Aly just killed Revan?

 

Phennir looked incredibly uncomfortable. “Revan has followers within the Empire, and the secret had to be kept. I…apologize if you feel ill-used, milady.”

 

“Three centuries ago,” pontificated Malgus, “Revan was strong in the dark side – a fallen Jedi the Emperor took an interest in. But he rebelled and had to suffer. Now, his story is ended.”

 

Some of the anger drained out of Aly’s voice and gave way to a deep sense of exhaustion. “He would’ve destroyed the Empire, given a chance.”

 

The Moff elected to change the subject. “Our teams are going over the Foundry as we speak. It’ll take some work, but everything should be salvageable. Even the HK unit, if we bother.”

 

“It may have useful memories, and it could be upgraded,” mused Malgus. “Regardless, we have a new army, and a victory for the ages: one to prove no would-be Sith or Jedi Master is a match for the Empire.”

 

Phennir turned toward me and Aly. “Celebrations will soon begin on Dromund Kaas, and the cheers of the people will become a battle cry as the true war begins.”

 

True war? HK unit? I still couldn’t get past the fact that the strike team just killed an insanely powerful Jedi hero that disappeared three centuries ago.

 

Aly turned a level stare on Malgus. “I helped you with this, but there’s going to have to be a trade.”

 

“I am more than willing to assist with the execution of Plan Zero, if that is what you require.”

 

She nodded. “Just remember that I’m not your personal enforcer.”

 

“I shall. Enjoy the fruits of your success. With your help, the galaxy will become a much different place.” With that, Malgus cut the feed.

 

Phennir bowed deeply. “Again, milady, the demands of security…”

 

“Forget it.”

 

“Very well. I, and the men and women under my command, offer our most profound thanks and gratitude for your assistance.”

 

Her voice went distant. “Yeah. It had to be done.”

 

“As you say, milady.”

 

“Until we meet again, I guess.”

 

“Farewell, milady.”

 

She didn’t utter a single word to me as we walked back to the hangar bay. We didn’t even say goodbye to the other strike team members as they packed up their stuff and got ready to leave, just headed straight to our ship. As Quinn piloted the Fury away from the Imperial battle group and began the calculations for the jump to lightspeed, she stalked over to her room and shut the door behind her.

 

Quinn had deposited a comatose Vette on the acceleration couch near the holoprojector in the main hold, and I was sitting next to her, idly, wondering what just happened and trying to figure out what to say to Aly, if anything, when I heard an inhuman scream that shook my whole body and set my teeth on edge.

 

Vette jolted awake. “Who the what now?”

 

All I could do was point to Aly’s room. “It…in there…”

 

Her eyes fixed on mine. “Your turn to deal with it,” she said with unusual clarity for somebody I’d thought was completely wasted.

 

I stood up and walked unsteadily toward her room. “Master? Aly?”

 

No response.

 

I looked back at Vette, who jerked her head in the direction of the door. Hesitantly, I keyed it open and walked inside, closing it behind me.

 

She was huddling on her bed, knees drawn up to her chin, arms wrapped around her legs. Her red eyes were raw, fixed and staring at the floor in front of her. She’d changed into her usual shipboard robes, but her armor was piled in a heap on the floor and her hair was a complete mess.

 

Seeing her, the woman I’d only half-jokingly referred to as the goddess of war, look so despondent, so terrified, just tore me up inside. It seemed viscerally wrong, like an inversion of the laws of the universe. Even when she’d been telling me about the awful things that had happened in her past, she’d never even come close to looking as broken as she was right then.

 

“Aly?”

 

Her head came up and she met my eyes, but she didn’t say a word.

 

“What happened there?”

 

“Punk.”

 

“Huh?”

 

“I…I’m just a punk,” she elaborated. “Small-timer. I thought I had a handle on things. Knew what was up. Saw the worst there was. Hard woman. Thought I could take anything. Didn’t…didn’t even come close.”

 

I moved over to her bed and sat down next to her. “What do you mean?”

 

She rested her head on her knees, staring off into space, and rocked back and forth. “Abyss. Look down in the abyss. Nothing. Infinite black. Void. Can’t look into it, because it’s looking back…”

 

“I don’t understand, Aly.”

 

“That Jedi Master. Revan. Big karking hero. You know what he was? You know what he was?” she said shrilly.

 

“No, Aly. I don’t.”

 

“Evil. Pure, unadulterated evil.”

 

There wasn’t anything I could think of to say.

 

“You know what his big plan was? Murder. The three alls. Kill all, burn all, loot all. Destroy the Sith. Everybody in the Empire. War droids on the streets of Kaas City. Men, women, and children. Worse than Pultimo.”

 

“Aly,” I said gently, “you’re not explaining this very well. Can I…can I see it in your mind instead?”

 

She unfolded her knees and took a deep breath. “Go ahead.”

 

It was easier, this time. I’d had practice by now. I didn’t even really need the breathing exercises anymore. Just-

 

Blackout.

 

It took me almost a minute to shake myself back to reality this time. But by then I understood everything.

 

A millennium ago, during the Great Hyperspace War, Supreme Chancellor Pultimo had ordered the Republic military to pursue the defeated Sith out of the Core and into the Outer Rim. At his behest, Republic forces had landed on Korriban and dozens of other worlds, completing the victory that had been won in the Koros system and at Primus Goluud. Even against the feuding wreckage of Naga Sadow’s empire, the Republic military was hard pressed. They’d moved millions upon millions of Sith into camps, to keep them from aiding the feudal Sith Lords that tried to wage a partisan war from the wilderness.

 

That brutal counterinsurgent campaign was one of the darkest times in Republic history. It had already passed partway into myth, so it was hard to separate fact from fiction. But almost all of those Sith had died in those camps, whether from neglect or, the worst rumors had it, as part of a planned campaign of extermination on the part of the Republic’s forces. I’d never really even thought about it as anything other than a half-remembered atrocity that was just one more indication of how regressive ancient society was. For the Sith, though, it was far more real than that: it was the founding catastrophe of the modern Empire.

 

And Revan’s plan with his Foundry droids wasn’t just to create a war-winning infinite army. He’d told Aly and the others straight out: he was restarting the old holocaust. Those Foundry droids were built with genetic scanners that identified Sith – and they made no distinction between man, woman, or child, or between soldier and noncombatant. His assassin droid had said that it was going to lead a ninety-seven point eight percent effective mass murder program. No negotiations. No quarter. Just corpses.

 

It wasn’t just Revan who was doing that, either. That Foundry had been guarded by the Republic Navy. White-hats had garrisoned the asteroid and fought alongside those genocide droids. And dozens of Jedi had participated in its defense. There was no way around it: the Republic and the Jedi Order knew that Revan was starting his lunatic pogrom, and they supported him all the way.

 

There really weren’t any Good Guys in this war, were there?

 

“Aly,” I breathed, “I’m so sorry…”

 

She shook her head miserably. “I had no idea. No idea. And the worst part is that now Malgus has the Foundry. People die by the droves anyway. The war gets bigger. No good options. Every choice is evil.

 

“I can’t deal with this, Jaesa. Murdering trillions…I can’t even comprehend how evil it is. It breaks the scale. These are the kind of people I’m up against now. Compared to them, I’m nothing. I don’t have it.”

 

I put my arm around her. “Aly, you do have it. You just stopped it. You won.”

 

“It’s just going to get worse…”

 

“So you keep fighting. Stay in the game.”

 

“I quit, Jaesa. They broke me.”

 

“So?” I said firmly. “That was five minutes ago. Forget five minutes ago. This is now. Get back up and start fighting again. I won’t let you quit.”

 

She gazed at me with tearful, red eyes and started to sing softly. “I’m sinking slowly, so hurry hold me…your hand is all I have to keep me hanging on…please, can you tell me, so I can finally see…where you go when you’re gone…”

 

“If you want to, I can save you,” I murmured. “I can take you away from here. So lonely inside, so busy out there…and all you wanted was somebody who cares.”

 

Aly started to sniffle again. I impulsively brushed her cheek with my lips.

 

For about half a second, I couldn’t believe what I’d just done. Was this…was I taking advantage of her? After all that anxiety, all the scenarios I ran in my head about how this might happen, I just…of all the times to do this, I had to pick when Aly was most vulnerable? What was wrong with me?

 

But there was another feeling in there. What was wrong with me was that I’d waited. And it was only seeing Aly when she most needed a shoulder to cry on and a hug of support that got my idiot self to finally stop moping around and do something.

 

Something unlocked in my chest, and I finally spoke.

 

“You don’t have to do this alone. I’m here for you. Because I…I love you, Aly.”

 

The smile on her face belied the tears that ran down her cheeks.

 

“You dummy,” she said. “What took you so long?”

 

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Notes to Chapter IX

 

I think that "the worst mass murder in galactic history" reasonably qualifies as an "apocalypse". Hey, it's not referential this time!

 

Our Nietzsche quote is one of my favorites. "He who fights monsters should see to it that he does not thereby become a monster. And when you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." Here, Aly stared into the abyss, and she fought monsters. The next several chapters will see whether she - and Jaesa - can keep from thereby becoming monsters.

 

The Foundry and Maelstrom Prison aren't explicitly located in the game itself, but The Essential Atlas located the Maelstrom Nebula in the New Territories, and the Foundry is in Lannik space per The Old Republic Encyclopedia.

 

Our "old Anaxsi myth" is, of course, The Odyssey. And that holodrama? O Brother Where Art Thou.

 

Vette's getting in digs at Anakin Skywalker's attack on the Jedi Temple and DS Revan having Zaalbar kill Mission on Lehon. In related news, Catherine Taber voiced Senator Amidala in TCW, Vette, and Mission.

 

In Caine's Law, Stover has Caine and Tucker raid an Overworld Company installation, and Caine gets weirded out when he sees that somebody left cookies out for the Social Police. That's where the "cookies left out for the Sith" line comes from - although soapies are much, much scarier than your garden-variety Sith.

 

Okay, so. The team. We've got Aly, who's a Vigilance Juggernaut, and [name withheld], who's a Marksmanship Sniper. Those are our DPS options. Then there's Majnun tanking as a Shield Tech Powertech, and Sakaria healing as a Corruption Sorcerer. Pretty decent team, although they only have one all-purpose CC and one droid CC, both of which aggro. DPS is solid but bursty. Great survivability, though. On a scale from 0 to 10, with Dark V being 0, 5 being neutral, and Light V being 10, we get something like this: Majnun (1), Saki (4), Aly (9), Cipher (10).

 

Jaesa's line about Vector's eyes comes from

about the USS Indianapolis in Jaws.

 

My Sniper was actually my first Imp side toon, and my first 50. Still got a soft spot for her, even if I don't remember the particulars of her story as well as I'd like after so long. The conversations between Aly and Cipher Nine probably rank as my favorite ones to write in this whole story.

 

It's something of a spoiler, but Cipher didn't fight a Jedi Master, of course; she fought a member of the Dark Council. And she has to keep it secret, so she doesn't get to win her game of Top Trumps with Aly.

 

"If we had some bruallki..." is straight from the Thrawn trilogy; Talon Karrde says it to Aves twice that I remember, once in Heir to the Empire and again in The Last Command.

 

I might be a little too close to things right now - having just played the real Saki through Chapters 1 and 2 - but I kinda wanna write her her own story. So I'm not really going to explain her...raw emotional state. People who've played SI before know what's what.

 

This briefing is more full than the one Phennir and Malgus actually give in "Call to Arms", because frankly the original one was kinda pathetic.

 

When I read Vesaniae's Afterimages, I loved how she used the word "drawl". It really stuck with me. So I wanted to try it out there with Aly. Just once.

 

"Majnun", incidentally, is my attempt to come up with a Rattataki-sounding name. It's Arabic, and means "madman" in MSA. Comes from a story about the poet Qays ibn al-Mulawwah, who fell in love with a girl who - for various reasons in different versions of the story - couldn't be together with him, so he wandered out into the desert to live as a hermit and scratch his verses onto stones. The girl's name?

. (Yes, that's where Clapton and Allman got the name.) It's, um, not really that appropriate for his character and personality, but I barely play as him anyway, so whatever.

 

I know the fleet battle isn't quite the same thing as personal combat. Still, though. WAR, GAISE. I guarantee that the next little arc will have more fights than you could shake a lightsaber at.

 

Vette's "who the what now" is from Avatar again: both Sokka and Aang say it.

 

The Three Alls were a policy followed by the Imperial Japanese Army in China during the Second World War. It pretty much amounted to just what Aly said: kill all, loot all, burn all.

 

Aly and Jaesa are singing their song to each other again. Although at the end of the story,

might be more appropriate.

 

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I’d Rather Be In Love

 

Bitte geh’ noch nicht; am besten gehst du nie

Ich hab’s dir schon so oft gesagt in meiner Fantasie

Bleib’ noch ein bisschen hier – bitte geh’ noch nicht

Was ich versuche dir zu sagen ist ‘ich liebe dich’!”

-Die Ärzte, “Wie es geht”

 

 

“So,” said Vette conspiratorially, “tell me about what happened last night.”

 

We were sitting in her bedroom the morning after, and she was acting way more energetic than I felt. You’d think that Twi’leks would get hit by a hangover twice as hard as anybody else, because of all that extra brain tissue in their lekku. Even though she’d gotten falling-down, passing-out drunk the day before, though, she was still perky as ever.

 

“I mean, at first I was super worried about Aly,” she continued, “but then you and she were all quiet in there for ages, and you didn’t leave the room, and then by the time I decided to just give up and go to bed you still hadn’t left the room. You totally slept over with her. So what happened? I wanna hear all the gory details.”

 

I smiled sheepishly. “There really aren’t any gory details, Vette. Nothing happened. We just fell asleep next to each other. Didn’t even have our clothes off.”

 

“Pft. Yeah, right.”

 

“No, it’s true,” I said earnestly. “I mean, she was going through something really bad there. When she and the team hit the Foundry, they stopped the Republic from committing genocide. Scary would be the understatement of the year. I went in there to comfort her, not ‘comfort’ her.”

 

“Oh, come on.”

 

“Besides, Aly’s…well, I wasn’t planning to bring that sort of thing up anyway, but I definitely wouldn’t after learning about her childhood,” I pointed out. “Imagine the kind of trauma that would cause.”

 

Vette opened her mouth wordlessly and closed it again before finally figuring out what to say. “Yeah. I didn’t think about that. Sorry. Got carried away.”

 

We just sat there quietly for a minute or so before I spoke up again. “Not that I wanted to murder the conversation like that…”

 

She coughed wetly and laughed. “Way to break it, Jaesa. Shee. I dunno what was worst there: you being such a stick in the mud, you being right, or me being an insensitive airhead.”

 

“Probably me being right. I mean, you know things are going down the tubes when that happens,” I quipped self-deprecatingly.

 

Vette’s rejoinder was abruptly cut off by a knock at the door. She paused for a moment, shrugged, and called back, “It’s open!”

 

“Oh. Hey, guys,” said Aly.

 

I turned around to look at her. She had her exercise gear on, a light sports bra and matching shorts that showed off her…I had to squash that line of thought before it went too far. Falling in love with Aly was one thing, but I still had enough of a sense of propriety to think that ogling her was not okay.

 

She caught me staring and smirked. “What, you forgot we were doing Echani kickboxing this morning?”

 

“Um. Yeah, actually. I’m pretty sure you didn’t tell me. I think.” Other things had been on my mind over the last few days.

 

“I didn’t,” she said with an evil grin. “I just wanted to see the look on your face when I came in.”

 

Vette giggled. “You two are so adorable together.”

 

“Together? Us?” Aly gasped in mock indignation. “Why, Jaesa and I are practically sisters…especially considering the lovely shade of red she’s wearing on her face right now. The nerve of you, suggesting such a thing! As punishment, I want you to put together five stim packs by dinner.”

 

She stifled another laugh. “Aly, you know you’re just going to take them apart again.”

 

Nevertheless. Off with you. Jaesa, go get dressed.”

 

“Can it really be called getting dressed when I’ll actually be wearing less clothing then than I am now?” I pointed out.

 

“Oooh, you mutineers! I’m docking you each a week’s pay.”

 

“We don’t get paid,” laughed Vette as she flounced out the door.

 

Aly craned her neck out the door and called after her, “Well then, I’ll make up a fake bonus check to not give you or something. Begone!”

 

By the time I was dressed, Aly was, as usual, hammering away at the heavybag in the cargo hold, this time with her feet instead of her fists. This time, though, she noticed when I came in and turned to greet me.

 

“So,” she said without preamble, “you’ve been doing pretty well with the grappling moves, but I’ve kind of been letting you off easy there. You get somebody in, say, a figure-four and it doesn’t really matter how strong you or they are, they’re not getting out because they can’t leverage much of anything to break it. Today I was thinking we’d do some Echani sweeping techniques, so you can start to make better use of the muscle you should be adding while still not taxing yourself too much on that end.”

 

“Aly…”

 

“Yeah, I know it’s kind of a haphazard schedule and you’re learning a lot of different things that don’t really seem to have much connection to each other, but we’re on the clock here, and I want you to have a varied arsenal of moves and techniques by the time we start up on this Plan Zero thing. A few months from now, maybe we’ll start real infighting…”

 

More firmly, I said, “Aly.”

 

“Yeah?” Her head came up and she met my eyes innocently.

 

I fumbled around a bit. “Last night…are we okay?”

 

“Wha…okay, sorry, usually I’d say something glib there but that’d be pretty inappropriate. Putting on my serious face.”

 

I smiled hesitantly.

 

“Yeah. We’re okay. You…you said something to me last night, and I guess I was feeling too overwhelmed to say anything back. So.” She took a breath. “I love you too, Jaesa.”

 

“You really,” I said happily, “know how to knock a girl off her feet.”

 

“Aw. You’re so sweet. Speaking of which…” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her abruptly swing her left foot back and then toward me. I tried to step away from it, but she’d been expecting that – my momentum took me in the exact wrong direction, so when her leg slid into my own legs I was already starting to fall down. With an unceremonious thud I landed on my right thigh.

 

Ugh. First bruise of the day.

 

She leaned in toward me. “Very poor choice of words.”

 

I halfheartedly kicked toward her in an imitation of her own sweep. Didn’t do anything. She just stood there, immobile as a statue.

 

“Way to kill the moment, Aly,” I griped mock-seriously.

 

“Most sweeps,” she went on, “only work if you can take advantage of poor balance on your opponent’s part. What’s often more important than the ability to execute a sweep – which is really almost trivial, for the kind we’re going for here – is the recognition of when it is most advantageous to do so.”

 

“So you’re going to beat the tar out of me while offering me one or two deliberately created opportunities to disrupt your balance, and I have to be smart or lucky enough to figure it out?”

 

She smiled. “Something like that, yeah.”

 

Three hours later, we sat back next to each other against the wall of the cargo hold, sweating profusely. That bruise had gotten some cousins. But I was starting to get the hang of intuiting Aly’s balance and catching her at just the right moment. She’d ended up on the floor plenty of times, too.

 

“Jaesa,” she panted, “I’ve kind of been wondering.”

 

I looked over at her. “Yeah?”

 

“We kinda got off to a pretty rough start. You know, the whole ‘passive-aggressive stalker thing’. What changed that for you? When did you decide that you could…could…”

 

“Love you?” I filled in.

 

She finally met my eyes. “That.”

 

“Aly, one of the very first things I decided when I finally met you was that I respected you. Feeling what you’d had to live through…” I reached over and traced a scar on her left bicep. “…I thought you were a hero. A real one, not a fake like Nomen Karr. By the time we left Nar Shaddaa, I admired you. I think I loved you already. I just didn’t figure it out and admit it to myself until my mom told me that I’d been acting completely infatuated with you, back on Dromund Kaas.”

 

Aly hung her head. “I…it’s just that I’ve never felt like anybody loves me before. Not my parents, obviously. Never had a, uh, a significant other, either. Nobody. Love’s one of those things I used to tell myself that I didn’t deserve. I guess I still don’t feel like I deserve it.”

 

We were both sweaty, stinky messes, but I hugged her anyway. “I think you do, Aly. But I don’t love you because of what you deserve. I love you because of who you are. You’re pretty, you’re funny, you’re smart, and you’re strong. You’re a wonderful teacher and a great friend. I love you because of who you will be: I think that you and I are going to do amazing things together. And I love you because of who you were: a terrified, abused little girl who cried out for help and the galaxy never answered, a girl I would give anything to have been able to save.”

 

“You only met me a few weeks ago…”

 

I nodded. “I did. But remember my power. You’ve known about me for a few months. You met me a few weeks ago. But I know you. Every little bit of you. I’ve been through your whole life. I feel like I’ve known you since the stars were born. And nothing I’ve seen would change my mind.”

 

Aly blinked her tears away. “That…that’s really…wow. You’re amazing, you know that?”

 

“I’d settle,” I said, “for not getting my butt kicked every time we spar.” She coughed a laugh, but then looked down, like she was badly ashamed. “Wait, what? Was it something I said?”

 

“No, it’s just…” She sighed. “It still feels too good to be true, you know? Like there’s no way you’d ever love me normally. And that makes me afraid. What if this is my fault?”

 

I laughed. “Of course it’s your fault, silly. I love you because of who you are.”

 

“No, I mean, what if it’s because of your empathy? Maybe the reason you love me is because you sort of…picked up my feelings for you. Remember when you used to have to interrogate suspected spies, and hated what you were doing because it made you feel intrusive? Maybe you thought that because they thought that.”

 

“Aly…”

 

She looked back at me through haunted eyes. “I just…if I’m making you do this somehow, I could never forgive myself.”

 

“I understand, Aly, but I can think for myself,” I said wryly. “I don’t just automatically adopt the feelings of everybody around me.”

 

“But…maybe…I don’t know. It scares me, that’s all.”

 

“Hey, you think you’re the first person to have a crush on me?”

 

She laughed through the tears. “Stop making me seem so silly.”

 

“Well, it’s not silly. I guess you have a point. Maybe there is some bleed-over. But it’s not like we could ever know for sure. And if it does play a role, I know it’s not the only reason I feel about you the way I do.”

 

I could feel the tension leave her body.

 

“Besides,” I continued, “I like it this way.”

 

“This is, like, the exact opposite of that talk we had after Nar Shaddaa,” she mumbled. “Put me on a battlefield and I know what’s what, but all this emotional stuff…I just don’t know how to deal with it.”

 

“Yeah, it is pretty weird for me to be telling you not to be so neurotic about something,” I said.

 

“Especially when you’re supposedly the emotionally repressed monk.” Then she saw me sigh, and watched my eyes get all distant, and hurriedly corrected herself. “Uh, I mean…crap, sorry.”

 

“No, it’s okay, I just…that is how I was trained. And you’re right, you know, I did have to grapple with what the Jedi say about love and attachment. Vette helped with that. But I feel these things. Like, I know them. Axiomatically. I know what doubt looks like, and there’s none of that here. I am absolutely sure.”

 

Her mouth twitched. “It must be nice, to not have any of those weird hang-ups like I do.”

 

“So that’s why you never said anything? You thought you didn’t deserve to be happy? And out of that came all these fears, that this wasn’t really true, that it wasn’t happening?”

 

She smiled ruefully. “Well, that was part of it. Most of it. There’s also, you know, our teaching relationship. I didn’t want to put any pressure on you. I thought we had a pretty good thing going, and it’d have been just awful if I ruined it like that.”

 

I almost thought to say that she was being silly for just making herself miserable. But, you know, Vette had had to give me that lecture yesterday.

 

Instead, I asked her this: “So how long did it take you to figure it out?”

 

“You mean, when did I decide, wow, I’m in love?” she said. “Remember that message you sent me, about meeting on your ship?”

 

“You’re kidding me.”

 

“Nope. Okay, so I knew you were a Padawan that everybody in the Jedi Order was impressed with, and you had some kick-butt Force powers that Baras was scared to death of. But other than that, not much, yeah? Then I start messing around.

 

“I mean, from my side, I was supposed to murder Yonlach and your parents; instead I end up beating the crap out of Yonlach and asking for his help, and funding your parents’ retirement in Sith space. I did what I could to try to mitigate things. From your side, though? I could imagine what you were thinking. This is weird, harassing stuff.”

 

“Done, no less, by an inscrutable Sith who doesn’t even act predictably evil,” I added.

 

“Exactly. This was a crazy few months you had to go through. Nobody’d have blamed you if you started to crack up.

 

“But then you send me this message where you act strong, talk decisive, and put yourself out there. The Sith are harassing you? Well, okay, you were gonna just meet the problem head-on, try and fix things instead of letting them fester, and screw the Jedi Order if it was going to try to make things worse.”

 

“And then I went back and welched on it,” I said unhappily.

 

“Well, yeah, but still. It wasn’t really your fault,” she said. “You made the effort and did what you could. You couldn’t help being up against a master manipulator like Karr. Plus, that was the first time I got to see what you looked like, and you were incredibly cute.”

 

I rested my head on her shoulder. “Flatterer.”

 

“But now, I mean, now that I’ve gotten to know you…yeah, you’re cute. Yeah, you’ve got those kick-butt Force powers,” she continued. “But you’ve also got that moral compass in there. And you care so much for other people it just blows me away. You left behind your entire life, became a traitor to the Republic, to save the lives of people you’d never met who lived under the control of a regime you despise.”

 

My voice caught in my throat. “I just did what anybody would’ve done when they found out.”

 

“If it were that easy, anybody would do it. I don’t have ‘anybody’ on board this ship. I’ve got you. ‘Anybody’ can take a hike.”

 

We just sat there for a few minutes, dripping sweat and smelling terrible. I didn’t care. The togetherness was what mattered. I’d never felt so close to anybody before.

 

Eventually, though, it had to end.

 

“I don’t know if this is a bad time,” I murmured, “but what are we going to do about this Republic stuff?”

 

“If you have to ask, it’s probably a bad time,” she chuckled.

 

“Seriously, though.”

 

“Okay, seriously. The genocide thing? I don’t know,” Aly sighed. “I kind of have a feeling, though, that this wasn’t the plan. The Jedi freed Revan a few weeks ago. Baras has had this Plan Zero thing gestating for years. There’s no way the Republic based their war strategy for the last few decades on an army of extermination droids that they didn’t even know existed.”

 

“So you think they kinda tried to fit it into the plan they already had?”

 

“Mmm-hmm,” she grunted. “Maybe it was of a piece with what they were already doing. Maybe it wasn’t. I don’t know enough to say.”

 

“We’re just sort of waiting, then?” I asked.

 

“Eh. I’m sure that by the time we get to fleetcom at Vaiken Spacedock, Baras’ll have something. Frankly, I’m surprised he hasn’t tried to contact us already.”

 

“And what happens when you do find out about the next target?”

 

I could feel her body tense up. “Hunt them down. Make sure they don’t pose a threat to the people of the Empire ever again.”

 

“Don’t turn into the thing you’re fighting, Aly,” I said cautiously.

 

She slumped back against the wall and closed her eyes. “I…yeah. I’ll keep that in mind.”

 

I smiled. “That’s all I wanted to hear. Now, are you as hungry as I am?”

 

“Ha. Yeah. I need a shower. And,” she said as she wrinkled her nose, “you do too. Then let’s go get a kriffing snack.”

 

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Notes to Chapter X

 

The title's from another Michelle Branch song off The Spirit Room.

 

Our quote's from a German pop-punk band. "

" is about a guy who's got commitment and communication issues, and can't ever seem to express his feelings to any of his girlfriends, so they break up with him. The quoted part is a slightly different version of the chorus, which he sings at the end: "Please don't go yet; ideally you'd never leave / I've said this to you so many times in my dreams / Stay here for a little while longer; please don't go yet / What I'm trying to say to you is 'I love you'." (Bothering to make that rhyme in English would be wayyyyy too much work.)

 

Aly's crew skill setup is biochem/bioanalysis/diplomacy, in case it wasn't obvious enough. :p

 

There are different kinds of figure-four locks - the leglock and headlock versions look kinda different - but the basic idea is that you leverage pretty much all the muscle in your legs (and your upper arms, if it's the headlock) in a position where the other person only has her hands free and basically nothing else. It's a great way for a weaker person to immobilize a much stronger one.

 

And yes, there, at the end, Aly is referencing Rex Ryan's

from Hard Knocks two years ago.

 

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