Despite not being in the room anymore, the siblings’ argument had grown loud enough to be heard from it. I couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying, but I knew that tensions were rising.
I could go and calm them down.
Instead, I took another sip of the tea and tried to ignore it.
“You know, at first I really didn’t like this, but it’s starting to grow on me,” I said to Shelish.
“Mmm, it is an acquired taste,” she replied while doing her best to ignore the spat as well.
“I’ll have to break out the Kaasian Red if you’re ever on board the Fury,” I said with a chuckle before remembering a very important detail. “Listen, about her power-up, I don’t want any funny business.”
“Funny Business?” she repeated back to me like it was a foreign language.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. No mind controls or hypnosis, none of that. I’m not looking for some force-sensitive servant and I don’t need something like Savage,” I explained.
“As you said, I’m not Talzin,” she replied coolly. “How long do you expect them to be at it?” she asked me.
“Not sure really. Did you have plans?” I replied before crossing my legs.
“Does it look like much happens here?” she asked with a smirk.
“No, but I’m sure motherhood has its fair share of complications,” I said with my own smirk. She bristled at the realization that I knew she had a child. Her cool smile was replaced by an icy glare.
Sure, her kid should have been completely hidden. There were certainly no signs in her hut that any children were there. Then again, the only reason I remembered Shelish in the first place was through her daughter. The girl would end up becoming the renowned assassin, Deathstick. I mean who chooses a drug as their professional moniker? The real-world equivalent would be a hitman named cocaine or ecstasy. Well, ecstasy isn’t that bad of a name, maybe she was on to something.
“Or maybe it’s your dealings with the Kouhun? Now I can imagine that probably keeps you busy,” I continued. The Kouhun was a particularly effective group of assassins that were active in this backwater sector. In the future, her daughter would be their leader. If anything though, it made sense that a talented Nightsister like Shelish would have been involved as well.
“You’ve made your point,” she replied. “Like I already said, I have no intentions of warping your friend’s mind,” she continued.
I gave her a nod and a smile before raising my teacup. “To our friendship,” I toasted.
With my fears assuaged for the moment, I allowed myself to relax. The siblings can take have all the discussions they need. It’s about time I had a little rest before something crazy happened. The past few weeks were a whirlwind of activity, and this wasn’t an accident. Kenobi was too weak-willed to end Anakin, meaning we had, at most, a few months of free activity before he returned as Vader from his little vision quest for a new lightsaber. Sidious was similarly busy with reorganizing the Republic. The Jedi may have fallen in a single day, but the mountains of paperwork and oversight needed to kill the Republic would take a few months.
So of course, my communicator started beeping.
“What? What could possibly be happening 2V?” I said into the device.
“There’s a situation, sir,” the droid replied in a panic.
I groaned, and Merrin chuckled.
“There better be a situation. Just tell me what’s up?” I demanded.
“2-1B just alerted me that our new guest is attacking him!,” he replied.
I jumped out of the chair and spilled what was left of my tea in the process. The grey liquid went all over Shelish’s floor. The façade of an all-knowing Sith was wiped away by the leaf-water.
I took a moment to smooth out my robes. “Sorry about that. As you can surmise, I gotta go,” I said to the two women before sprinting out of the house.
In the yard, Alha was holding Alhoy by the shoulders as they argued. “A power to protect you! To finally be the big sister I was supp-“ she stopped her retort upon seeing me burst from the door.
“Something up?” Alhoy asked upon regaining his own composure. By that point I had already blown past the two was springing down the path to my ship.
“Our guest woke up. Feel free to continue your discussion!” I called over my shoulder before disappearing into the forest.
While I told them not to worry, I did have a gut feeling that something annoying was about to happen. That’s just the thing about being a force-user. Gut feelings were just the force’s way of telling you what was going to happen.
I thought that annoyance would just be replacing my medical droid and maybe needing to get 2V repaired after calming down our guest. But it seemed Bariss had other plans. Just as I made it back to the clearing where the Fury was, I could make out a figure through the viewports on the bridge. Then the engines came online, and it started to take off.
It was already in the air when I got close, so I didn’t have the time to make it to the now closing landing ramp. Instead, I launched myself up onto the top of the wing and began climbing my way over to the bridge.
By the time I got there, the ship had cleared the tree lines and started to switch from using the repulsors to the actual engines in order to accelerate. When I got the chance to peer in through the windows, I might have laughed if I wasn’t so furious.
Have you ever seen a bald, one-limbed, and slimy-with-bacta Mirialan trying to operate a starship in just her underwear? I can only imagine she had made it this far through some creative uses of the force. She was even wearing the seat harness just to stop herself from falling out of the chair. Her one good arm was on the wheel. The other buttons and levers required for piloting were seemingly moving on their own as she manipulated them with the force.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
I activated my saber, and with a wince, stuck it through the transparisteel window in order to anchor myself. I really hated damaging my ship. The Fury was a one-of-a-kind at this point and spare parts would probably need to be custom made!
Then I reached out with the force to take control of the wheel from Bariss. It wasn’t terribly difficult to rip it from her hands. Her once well-trained muscles had atrophied significantly in prison. The much harder part was steering the ship. The Fury lurched back and forth as I spent valuable time overcompensating each turn to try to get the thing back on track.
Once the wheel was locked out of her hands, Bariss gave me an angry look. Then she chose to push the accelerator forward, which soon sent us flying. The force of it almost knocked me off the window, and I had to empower my hand just to keep a hold of my lightsaber.
To stop her, I took my attention off the wheel and instead slammed the accelerator back with the force. The mechanism bent at an odd angle, while the lurch from full speed to nothing left the engines sputtering.
In response, Bariss used that moment to turn the wheel as hard as she could. The ship lurched wildly again as it began spinning in the air. I was once more forced to redouble my efforts in just hanging on to my saber as the centrifugal force pulled my body away from the window.
Thoroughly through with her games, I ripped the wheel out of her hands again. In my anger though, I put far too much strength into the movement and the controls came clean off the console.
With no controls and the engines failing from our previous fight over the accelerator, the ship started to plummet towards the ground. We weren’t that far up. The ship was only a treelength or two above the forest, but we picked up a dangerous amount of horizontal speed in the little scuffle for control.
I switched tactics and used the force to anchor myself to the window and then began to cut a hole in it. “Switch to the co-pilot console!” I yelled.
The girl began pressing random controls on the console.
“No that’s the-“ I tried to explain, but my voice was drowned out by the concussion missiles releasing around me.
I finished cutting through the window and ripped the section out of the way. I was out of time though, as the ship began smashing into the tops of the trees sending branches, leaves, and splinters around me. I threw my saber into the cockpit. It spun through the air and cut her out of the pilot’s chair. With a quick flick of my wrist, Bariss was shot through the window. In a flash, I caught her and jumped away from the soon-to-be crash.
I flipped, then stabilized through the air as I came to a surprisingly light landing on my feet. It didn’t matter, I could only stare as my ship cut a path through the swampy forest and then came to a crashing halt on the surface.
“My Fury…” I whispered to myself.
It was only after a series of explosions manifested in the atmosphere that I was shocked out of my stupor. Bariss began squirming in my grip, and I was all too happy to let her go. She fell to the mud with a splat, then glared up at me as if she expected some other outcome.
I stared back and began visibly shaking in anger, before I repeated more loudly, “My Fury!”
I should just crush her. That’s what she deserves for hurting my ship!
My hands flexed into fists so hard that I wouldn’t have been surprised if my fingernails dug into my skin. Then I struck. I punched and punched; each hit landed so hard that they sent small shocks through the air. By the time I had worked out my anger, I was breathing heavily from the exertion. The massive swamp tree beside the two of us was barely standing from all the blows it weathered. I took a deep breath and pushed it over, sending it crashing to the ground away from us.
I turned back to Bariss who was still lying in the mud and said, “ok, I think I can handle an explanation now.”
She just stared at me. She no longer had the defiant frown she wore as she was trying to steal my ship. Instead, it was replaced by the type of fearful expression you might wear when facing down a charging rhino.
When it was clear she wasn’t ready, or possibly able, to say anything, I sighed and said, “fine, I’ll go first.”
“Welcome to Jhas, not that it matters. I was hoping to leave this bug-infested place sooner rather than later. You’re no longer in custody. My team and I rescued you from inquisitors along with the rest of their kidnapped children," I explained.
“The kids? You got them out of the prison?” she said and finally latched onto the conversation.
“Yeah, I sent them off with Master Billaba to go find the newly hidden Jedi academy,” I explained.
“No, no, no, everyone’s dead. They showed me. The clones they turned on us! It’s a trick!” she said while growing more frantic.
“Yes, many died. And you were all tricked,” I explained as I took off my black cloak. “But many survived, and after we raided the prison, many more will survive,” I continued in the best calm and reassuring tone I could muster.
“No, I saw it! Nobody listened to me,” she was starting to yell.
“I am listening,” I replied and handed her the cloak. “But I’d be a much better listener after we use the refresher and get you some real clothes,” I explained.
She seemed to understand the sentiment and wrapped it around herself. Then I held out my hand to pull her up.
She regarded me for a second, then accepted it. I doubt she understood that I was going to be carrying her though. She let out a small, embarrassed noise when I set her against my shoulder.
On the walk back to the ship I tried my best to explain the circumstances. Bariss was very sensitive to the force. That’s why she knew something was wrong with the clone wars. That’s why she was able to see through some of Sidious's shadows. So, I bit the bullet and just explained who I was and how we got in this situation.
“You, an ancient Sith Lord, fought off Anakin Skywalker, who apparently fell to the dark side and is also now a Sith, while I was gone, just to save some younglings?”
“There’s like a thousand holovids of my ship saving them from the temple,” I replied. Most of them were attached to bounty pucks at this time though.
“Why though? Why save me? Why save the kids from the prison?” She questioned.
“Well, I could never be Sidious’s apprentice and he doesn’t suffer rivals. Maybe I want to use you. Maybe I think I could use the Jedi to fight him off,” I replied. Then I looked up at the sky and thought of Jaesa and the alliance before saying, “or maybe one of my best friends used to be a Jedi.”
The Fury didn’t look great. The wings, which extended far past the bridge, were lodged into the mud so far that much of the base was resting on the ground. The landing gear wasn’t deployed, which meant the ramp couldn’t be extended.
I activated my handheld communicator and contacted X2, who thankfully survived the crash. At my behest, he tried to boot up the repulsors to dislodge the ship but couldn’t get them online.
“Ok buddy, try to release the feet and see if that lifts us up,” I explained.
I received an affirmative set of beeps before the rear landing gear opened and extended without issue. The front didn’t move, so I walked over to get a better look. Sure enough, the compartments couldn’t open on account of being driven into the dirt.
I reached out with my free hand and began the slow process of lifting the front out with the force. Having done this type of heavy lifting before I knew how arduous the task was. Yet, it moved out of the mud with surprising ease. It took almost no effort before the wingtips were freed from the mud and the legs began to unfold.
“You alright?” I asked Bariss after confirming that the legs were locked out. Using the force in that way tended to give you tunnel vision, so it was only after I finished that I noticed her breathing heavily.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” she asked while looking away.
“Never mind,” I replied. Then we walked back towards the now descending entrance ramp. The hull wasn’t looking good from the crash. Nothing looked unfixable, but we were probably going to be planet-side for a while.
Before we made it in, the siblings flew out of the air and landed on the ramp behind us.
“You know Zaros, you really shouldn’t be drinking and flying,” Alha said with a forced chuckle. She knew how much I liked my ship and probably thought it might be comforting to make light of the situation.
“Our guest is awake?” exclaimed Alhoy when I turned around.
“Yeah, can you take over? She could use some help getting changed,” I said to Alha.