Crash and Burn

Jaina guided her X-wing smoothly into the small hangar bay and powered it down. She hoped that she would be left alone, but one glance out of the canopy window showed that she would receive no such luck. Four royal guards were ready to receive her and escort her out to and through the spaceport. For a few moments, she sat silently in the cockpit and wondered if there was a minimally diplomatic way to send them away. Then she reasoned that they were unlikely to try to talk to her. As she expected, the tall women, veiled and covered by two layers of loose robes, said not a word to her as she climbed down.

They walked with a silent urgency that made Jaina want to slow down, for no other reason than to be contrary, and re-assert that she was not a servant – not of the Hapan royal family, not of the New Republic, not of anyone. On Hapes, she was a guest, and she expected to be treated like one. Or, at the very least, allowed to walk slowly after flying almost nonstop for two weeks. More than anything, she wanted something to drink that didn’t taste like ship-recycled water, and she wanted out of her filthy clothes.

She caught sight of someone vaguely familiar standing in the open space between the hangar hallway and the main spaceport platform, but didn’t recognize the other woman immediately. She was as tall as the guards, with long red hair arranged neatly into braids that fell over the shoulders of her deep burgundy cloak, which she wore over a close-fitting lizard-skin bodysuit. In one of her hands was a canteen, and in the other was a paper-wrapped object about twice as large as a human fist.

For five years, Tenel Ka had accepted the loss of her left arm, cut off just above the elbow during a sparring match with another Jedi student at the Academy. Because the accident happened due to her own faulty lightsaber, she had taken it as her own loss, and refused to get a mechanical replacement for the missing limb – well, that reason, and Jaina strongly suspected that Tenel Ka was willfully defying her grandmother, Ta’a Chume. But sometime in the six months since Jaina had last seen Tenel Ka, the princess had decided to be fitted with a mechanical forearm after all.

Jaina’s throat tightened as much as her fist did. Jacen was the one who had accidentally severed Tenel Ka’s arm. Perhaps Tenel Ka didn’t want to remember him any more than Jaina did.

“Good afternoon, Jaina,” Tenel Ka said. Her voice was calm, emotionless. That, in and of itself, told Jaina nothing; the words, however, bothered her.

“Aren't we friends anymore?” Jaina asked. “I’m going to get right to the point because if I’m not wanted here, I can leave.”

“It was you who left. The others have been staying here for two months while you had your own plans.”

“Somebody had to do something. The Jedi Order doesn’t really exist anymore, and nobody knows where Lumiya is. I think she’s hiding out in the Angwel sector, but that’s close to Imperial Remnant space and nobody is willing to risk making the Remnant mad. They’ve been neutral so far but if they join the Stellar Imperium, we’ve lost.”

Tenel Ka didn’t respond to that except to hand over the canteen and wrapped object, which was revealed to be a sandwich. “Thanks,” Jaina said.

“My mother and father want to talk to you once we return to the palace,” Tenel Ka said. “The New Republic fleet is not the only one that can go against the Stellar Imperium. If the new headquarters location is verified and we know where their fleet is, perhaps the Consortium’s fleet would balance the risk caused by the Imperial Remnant.”

“If I hadn’t been a wild ronto and chased Lumiya off instead of sending the information to the New Republic military headquarters,” Jaina said. “Be as direct as you usually are. It won’t hurt my feelings.”

“I said what I needed to say. I am not worried about your feelings but I am worried about you.”

“It seems like you have enough to concern yourself with here. The situation has to have gotten bad if you got a mechanical arm.”

“When the rest of the Jedi Order fell ill, I knew I needed to have as much of my ability in the Force available to use. I do not fight with the replacement. But it is useful for carrying and concealing things.”

“Is that the only reason? Would you rather forget what caused the injury in the first place?”

“No. It was a valuable lesson learned.”

“I meant him.”

There was a long silence as the unmarked speeder sailed over the highways, heading for the palace on a twisting course. “Jaina, you know what happens when a person holds onto grief for too long.”

“I think you’d better explain it to me.”

“It eats away at her and she turns into something else. Something that swallows all light, like a black hole. You darken.”

“You think I’ve gone to the Dark Side,” Jaina accused. “If that was the case, I should be asking Lumiya to train me. I wouldn’t be looking for her so I could kill her.”

“That sounds like revenge.”

“Then the entire New Republic fleet is full of Sith, because they’re looking for her, too.”

“You are being disingenuous. My mother has opened up the palace as a refuge for the remaining Jedi. If you are one of them, you may join the others there. If not, then I will have the speeder turned around and you can continue your quest alone.”

“Choosing not to dishonor the dead doesn’t make me any less of a Jedi,” Jaina hissed.

Jaina was whisked away to a private area of the palace when she got there, to change her clothes and take a shower before dinner. She came down in the simplest of the four gowns offered to her, which was still a few centimeters too long and much too frilly for her tastes, and she sat with the others during a five-course dinner that she inhaled more than ate. Remembering table manners took most of her concentration; she couldn’t easily field questions at the same time, and she managed to avoid most of them.

She went out to the gardens alone after dinner. At least, she thought she was alone, until she felt a presence behind her, and whirled around. There was no mistaking the tall, lanky shadow caught lurking behind the white stone wall at the entrance of the garden maze.

“I don’t react well to people trying to ambush me,” she called out.

Zekk finally appeared, and he opened his hands to show that they were empty. “I’m not going to hurt you, Jaina. You know that. You should know that.”

“I don’t know what to think anymore,” she said. “Except that when I think, I want to do it alone.”

He appeared either oblivious to or unconcerned about the warning tone in her voice. “We’re all worried about you.”

“Have a little faith, then, that nothing is going to happen to me. I’m not stupid!”

“That’s not what I meant. You’re barely a glimmer in the Force now, and it’s because you’re so far away from it. You’re doing things that no real Jedi would, for reasons that none of us would. You’re dangerously close to the Dark Side.”

“The reason you can’t feel me in the Force as much is because I’m blocking. I don’t want to be felt.”

“Why?” Zekk wasn’t going to leave her answer alone.

“I have my reasons.” Jaina wavered, unsure of how much she wanted to say to him. She didn’t want to look weak, and that was the best of all possible scenarios. He might just decide she was crazy. “I still hear his death cries. Sometimes.”

“Whose? Jacen’s?”

Jaina nodded, and she turned her head away. At the mention of her late brother’s name, her eyes started to sting. “I don’t know what took him, Zekk. I thought he froze to death, but there’s more to it now. There’s pain, and it’s not like anything I’ve ever felt before.” Her fist curled and her nails cut into her palm, leaving little red crescents. “More in the past few days. I can’t just grieve and be done with it like everybody else seems to have done. His spirit won’t leave me alone! I’ve been shielding for two days and it’s silenced him.”

Jaina sat down on a stone bench, with her feet on the edge and her knees pressed to her chin. “He’s supposed to have become one with the Force, Zekk. But he didn’t, and I know that it’s because of the Sith. How can I just let them run around and make their plots, and not at least try to bring them down and find out what they did to him?”

“So you can fix it? Or so you can get back at them?”

“Maybe both.”

Zekk sat next to her and put his arm around her shoulders. She started to pull away, but then decided not to; she could always just get up and walk somewhere else if she felt too unsettled. “Let it go. That’s all you can do now. Jaina, I miss him, and Anakin, and everyone else who’s died in this war. Day doesn’t go by that I don’t think of them. And Alema, and Raynar, and now Sannah – she might not even be able to go through the Changing now that her legs had to be removed from right above the knees. What I’m saying is this, though – that there aren’t many of us left, who aren’t trapped on Coruscant by the quarantine and who still have our powers. The Grand Master can only do so much to guide us from where he is. We have to be careful – very, very careful – not to fall to the Dark Side, because the only thing worse than losing a Jedi to death is losing a Jedi to the ranks of the Dark Jedi. You don’t have to kneel down and pledge your allegiance to Lumiya to let evil start creeping in.

“If you can still question what you’re doing, then you aren’t really lost. And I think you know now that it’s not going to make you feel any better even if you did find Lumiya and put your lightsaber right through her chest. It’s not going to bring Jacen back. How do you know that the feelings you’re getting aren’t exactly what she wants you to feel?”

“I’m tired of talking about it,” said Jaina.

“The Force makes you uncomfortable not because of who’s in it but what you are. I know what the Dark Side feels like and it isn’t fun at all. It hurts, all over.”

“This isn’t the Shadow Academy, Zekk! This is Lumiya. The one who trained under my grandfather when he was still Darth Vader. That’s right – I’m Darth Vader’s granddaughter.”

“It shows.”

Jaina pushed him away and jumped off the bench. She felt like lashing out at something, anything, and she honestly didn’t want Zekk to be her target. Better that there was no target, not here, where she didn’t have a real reason to be angry or violent. That could be saved for battle. The tingling in her body, which had momentarily bothered her before dinner, was back. She didn’t like it. It made her think she might be going crazy, and the one thing she was sure of – thought she had been sure of – is that, no matter what confusion she had, she was still able to think rationally. She was only missing key facts.

An icy hand reached out from nowhere, invisibly, and sent her sprawling on the ground. She tried to get up, but found that her arms and legs wouldn’t move. I’ve been hit, she thought, and wondered momentarily if Zekk had decided that he had enough of her not-quite-traditional ethics after all. Then she descended into the abyss.

“She says she is ready to speak,” said Queen Mother Teneniel Djo. She stood next to the slightly open door. “She has called for the two of you.”

Tenel Ka and Zekk went into the room. Jaina had been unconscious for almost a day, and unwilling to move or speak for two more. Now she lay still on her bed, staring up at the ceiling.

“Jaina?” Zekk said hesitantly.

Jaina’s voice was hoarse, but she spoke with conviction. “Jacen is alive.”

“How do you know this?” Tenel Ka’s brow creased.

“I saw him. He was in a room with metal walls, and he was in pain that I can’t even start to describe. It touched me for a moment and I thought it would kill me.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then… it stopped. Something brightened and it stopped.” Jaina turned her head as her neck relaxed. “There were two presences with him, both of them doing just what you said. They swallowed the light, but one of them disappeared. I think there were two Sith with him and he killed one of them.”

“Jaina, are you sure of this?” Zekk asked. “I don’t want to doubt you, but-“

“Of course I’m sure!” Jaina shouted. “I don’t know where he is, but he doesn’t have the Force virus and he’s alive.” She started to sit up and swing her legs to the side of the bed, and when she did that, her head swam and everything around her started to spin.

“Do not be hasty,” Tenel Ka said, and pushed Jaina gently but firmly back down with her right arm. “You are ill. You still have the information from Welk’s navigational computer, do you not?”

“My astromech has it all,” said Jaina.

“And did you go to every location that he had gone to?”

“Not all of them. Only the ones that I could find on my own maps. There were three systems that looked fake, and I didn’t want to run into a Stellar Imperial trap.”

One week and several scout missions later, the report came back. One of the systems had no life at all, and one showed evidence of wildlife, but no evidence of civilization other than one tiny, isolated region of electrical activity that was more likely to be a small storm than a single building. The third, however, was teeming with ships.

The New Republic and Hapan fleets began to gather.