12

DAGOBAH

A quaking power awaited him just beneath the surface. Ageless could feel it. With each passing day he felt it more and more, and could tell that whatever he sought also sought him. He breathed in the fumes of ik’tra’zihm and performed small orbit, and the tingling sensation increased in both his palms and fingertips, and a heat rose in them. His hands sometimes burned like they were over flames, even when he was outside at night in the freezing rain.

It was training unlike any other Ageless Void had ever experienced, it even tested his mind in ways the Nest’s cruelest proctors had not. And by the time he was standing in front of the orb-shaped training remote, lightsaber ignited in his hand, moving about in the sludgy earth of the swamp and trying to duck its blasts, he had come to feel a deepening. His mind slipped further and further down into this possible dream. He allowed himself to walk through the dreamscape of Dagobah and did whatever Yoda told him to do.

The lightsaber cast the darkened forest into a blue haze, the fog obscured almost everything, sometimes he even lost track of where Yoda was standing. The remote floated around and spat small red laser darts at him and stung him on his head, hands, arms, legs and torso. Ageless never once came close to deflecting one of the laser darts.

After several hours, bent over and panting, Ageless switched off the lightsaber at Yoda’s command. The Jedi said, “Just as I thought. Beyond you, it is, to learn predictive powers. That is not your gift, just like it was not your grandmother’s gift. So much of her in you, there is, that there is only one path for you.”

Yoda led him into his hut for what Ageless thought was going to be another session of inhaling ik’tra’zihm, but instead the Jedi produced a small, beaten box with familiar designs on it. He recognized the sigil from a necklace his grandmother used to wear, a golden circle with many blades fanning out from it in a spiral.

“What is this?” asked Ageless, wiping sweat from his brow.

“Just as I cannot teach you much more in the ways of the Force, neither could Shreya teach me much in the Dathomiri ways.” He opened the box and revealed a holoprojector. “Chronicles, these are, of your grandmother and her people performing the Sacred Dance and other rituals, which expanded their ability to allow them to Attune and summon the stoic flame.” Yoda handed the box over to Ageless. “When gone, am I, need these to continue your training, you will.”

Ageless activated the holoprojector and there, in front of his face, was a blue-glowing image of his grandmother, a bit younger than he remembered her, dancing in a circle with other female Zabraks. Though, even as they danced, they lunged towards one another menacingly in a strange mimicry of fighting, and the others would strike a pose and snarl, a tableau of rage and joy and violence and celebration. He cycled through the images, and came upon holovids of his grandmother at work in her kitchen, crumbling leaves over a boiling pot. How many times had he seen her doing that? Her lips were moving and she was speaking in a strange language, then alternated between it and Basic. "--and these kallahr leaves are needed in equal measure as un'ktun extract, so as to make the body's pores open and receptive to the magicking--" she was saying.

Just seeing her again…Ageless could not remember the last time he had smiled, but he was smiling right now. Now grinning and chuckling. That was her. That was his grandmother. There was no audio on most of the vids but he knew that in some of them she was humming the song she had taught him. She was always humming it.

Suddenly, from outside, he could hear R4 squealing excitedly.

Ageless crawled out of Yoda’s hut, and when he stood up he found the Dathomirian Curse gliding down from the sky, its lights searching for an area to land. Ageless had called R-3PO and asked him to bring the Curse to land near him. He took out his commlink as the ship lowered its landing gear, and said, “Looks like you found your way, Threepio.”

“Yes, sir,” came the droid’s reply. “Though, I can hardly guess why you wish me to land in such an uncertain terrain.”

“I’m going to need the trainer droid.”

“For what, sir?”

“I told you, I met a friend out here. He’s going to teach me how to use a lightsaber. And if I’m going to learn the right way, I need to fight against someone who knows how the Jedi fight. Yoda’s got all the information, I just need to program it into TRD-5, that’ll give me a good sparring partner.”

“Sir, may I ask, how much longer do you plan on staying here?”

Ageless glanced behind him, at Yoda’s hut. It had been almost a month since he'd arrived, and so far he hadn't gotten word from the Voice of Ether. Either he hadn’t made a decision yet on what to do with Loriss Gaffrey, or he simply had other things on his mind. Ageless wasn’t sure he was ever going to go back now, not with these images of his grandmother and testaments from a man that had known her. Part of him suddenly wanted to return to Dathomir and see her with his own eyes, but recently he had come to realize that the moment she saw him, she would know all he had done. She would see the darkness in him, and would know what kind of man he had become.

An agent. A killer. An assassin. One with hardly a conscience to speak of anymore. That is, until he'd sat foot in the dreamscape that was Dagobah, and met this strange, green, big-eared Jedi Master. Something is changing within me. Something is drawing me near to it. Not the path of a Jedi, nor perhaps even the path of my people...not a Dathomirian nightbrother or whatever...but something else. What? He hadn't decided yet.

“Just bring the trainer droid out here, Threepio,” he said, shaking himself out of the reverie. “We’ll talk about it later.”

* * *

FORM I of LIGHTSABER COMBAT: Shii-Cho

FORM II of LIGHTSABER COMBAT: Makashi

FORM III of LIGHTSABER COMBAT: Soresu

FORM IV of LIGHTSABER COMBAT: Ataru

FORM V of LIGHTSABER COMBAT: Shien / Djem So

FORM VI of LIGHTSABER COMBAT: Niman

FORM VII of LIGHTSABER COMBAT: Juyo / Vaapad [redacted]

The books had no titles on them, no author’s names. The tomes were old and most were brittle, with pages cracked and falling out. There were hundreds of pages written in tiny script that sometimes looked like Aurebesh and sometimes looked like some kind of offshoot script. Much of what he read would not have made sense if he hadn’t been able to look at a few holovids of old Jedi Masters performing the movements. Yoda had apparently kept a few pieces of “sacred Jedi texts” when he fled the Jedi Purge, and for several days now he had put both them and the holovids to use, guiding Ageless through the forms of lightsaber combat.

Form I was also called “Way of the Sarlacc,” or the “Determination Form.” It focused on the basics of lightsaber combat and put emphasis on merely blocking and staying alive, while searching for a safe means of disarm. Form II was a dueling-centric form, concentrating on one-on-one fighting with another saber user and trying to deflect the enemy’s saber off centerline, searching for dominance. Form III, called Soresu, or the “Resilience Form,” was a means of blocking blaster bolts and predicting where they would come from next. Yoda had already told Ageless that it was too late for him to learn this, he was just too old to start learning Force powers according to Jedi teachings. “But hurt you to learn the patterns, it couldn’t,” Yoda said. "What the various fighting styles look like, you should know."

"What for?"

"To recognize them if you see them."

Ageless tackled these first three forms every morning, trying to get enough of the basics down in each one, even though he could already tell the fluidity and dexterity would mean at least a year before becoming proficient, perhaps several years. Still, Yoda seemed impressed with the determination he showed. “Absorb all of this quickly, you do. I see now why the Empire prized you enough to bring you into their ranks.”

The days rolled into one another. He woke, he stretched and warmed up, he breathed in the ik’tra’zihm, he meditated, he breathed in and out with small orbit, and he moved excitedly through the lightsaber forms, exulting in this new sense of power and bodily expression.

Once he had a solid foundation of the first three forms (nowhere near mastery or even expertise, just a foundation), he moved through Ataru, the Fourth Form, which was highly aggressive and relied on strength and dexterity to overwhelm an opponent, practicing the three axes of rotation in three-dimensional space: jung su ma, ton su ma and en su ma. Essentially spinning, somersaults and cartwheels. His Teräs Kasi training came somewhat in handy here, as did Udas’mon tactics.

Form V was created by masters who wanted to end a battle early. There were lots of quick-draw and one-strike techniques that struck an opponent without preamble. Ageless took to this aggressive form the most.

Form VI was a smooth blend of all the other forms, a jack-of-all-trades approach that got rid of any extraneous movements. Ageless also liked this style of combat. It encouraged practitioners to "Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, and create what is essentially your own."

He performed each of these forms in front of the TRD-5 trainer droid, going through a series of slow-paced choreographed sessions, before finally allowing the droid to watch the holovids and read the Jedi texts to better interpret the movements. Then, under the watchful eye of the Jedi Master, Ageless picked up a long stick to represent his lightsaber, and gave a similar stick to the droid.

They began going through the motions, and already Ageless saw a way of inserting his own martial skills into the forms, looking for openings in the Jedi method of attack. There were flaws, no martial arts system was free of them. Of course, he could not predict what sort of powers a Force-user might use at any given moment, but he was able to use the same rhythms and pacing of a lightsaber-wielding duelist, mimicking the style enough to adhere to the necessities of saber combat, but found the sequences malleable enough that he could augment them with his own knowledge of martial arts.

The pace picked up, and soon Ageless was in a state of no-mind, flowing with the droid rather than resisting him. He shut his mind and sang the song. At times, he found himself testing out the dance movements he had seen his grandmother and the other Zabrak women performing in the holovids. He even closed his eyes from time to time, just for a few seconds, and ran through small orbit, all while singing and dancing.

His palms tingled.

His fingertips felt like they were on fire.

The lightsaber forms felt both alien and learnable.

It all flowed together in a bizarre new style that was increasingly becoming his own.

This was his new rhythm, and often he did it without Yoda even being present. At the end of each session, Ageless doused his hands in ik’tra’zihm and let the energetic feeling penetrate his pores. He inhaled deeply of its strange minty scent, and felt a cascade of warmth pass over him. He carried this feeling with him in each sparring session with the trainer droid. Ageless had the droid ramp up the intensity, and soon the droid was somersaulting and lunging at him and punching him and kicking him and pursuing takedowns. They slammed one another into the mud, as R4 and R-3PO watched in stunned silence. They disarmed one another and exploited each other’s weaknesses, sweeping each other's legs. Each combatant looked for the gaps in the Jedi way of fighting, and into those gaps they inserted any number of deadly tactics from a dozen different arts.

In Ageless’s endless testing, a pattern began to emerge, and four glaring weaknesses became apparent: first, none of the Jedi styles of fighting counted on the free hands of their opponent to check their limbs—hands checking elbows, feet checking knees, and so forth; second, the Jedi seemed to have prioritized preserving life over ending it, which kept even their most aggressive forms from being as truly brutal as they could be; third, their footwork was nowhere near as efficient as Teräs Kasi’s, which focused on getting in close fast, and then, while their weapons were locked against an enemy’s, blasting the enemy’s face hard with fists, palm strikes, elbows, and headbutts; and finally, he found that if he held his lightsaber tip-down, and kept it there, most of the first three Jedi forms’ attacks (Shii-Cho, Makashi and Soresu) were inadequate to get through his newly-developed defenses.

At least when it comes to what me and TRD-5 have come up with, he thought between sparring sessions.

Exploiting these openings gave him an insight into a Jedi’s mind mid-combat, and allowed him to begin writing down concepts to break down such an enemy. Though it was unlikely this would ever happen, it was no less a terrific mental exercise.

This went on for days. Bruised, beaten, and sometimes bloody, Ageless would crawl into Yoda’s hut each night and say nothing. The Jedi Master would say nothing back, but would share his stew as always. Yoda would sit and meditate to himself, then put out the fire and cough himself to sleep. The unspoken invitation to sleep inside the hut was not lost on Ageless, but he preferred to remain outside, sometimes inside his own tent, sometimes sitting upright and cross-legged in the rain, running through small orbit and feeling his palms heating up until he felt Yoda’s presence the next morning.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

The Jedi Master was always there, always ready to push Ageless's training farther.

Yoda gave tips on footwork and blade placement when in “the bind”—that was what it was called when two lightsabers locked against one another. The bind was important, and a saber duelist could not be an efficient combatant if he or she did not know how to control an enemy’s lightsaber during this critical moment.

“Feel the give and take from the opponent, you must,” Yoda said, as Ageless’s practice stick locked against the trainer droid’s. “Like the ebb and flow you feel in the Force when you perform small orbit, you can feel which way the blade will flow. Adjust your stance, you must. There! Very good!”

The trainer droid came at Ageless fast and aggressively, and Ageless shuffle-stepped backward, keeping his stick on centerline while matching the droid’s strokes. He kept the two “blades” locked in the bind and managed to control which direction the next thrust came from. And, as he did this, he fell into the small-orbit breathing again, and felt the heat rising inside him.

He emptied his mind, and went on the offensive. The trainer droid tried to keep up, but backpedaled and even tripped once as Ageless advanced with footwork from Udas’mon. He moved in fast, batted the blade away, punched the droid in the face and then bound their sticks together and performed a single swirling motion Yoda had taught him from Form II. The droid’s stick went flying from its hand, and it finally yielded.

Panting, Ageless looked back at Yoda. “Not bad, eh? Looks to be working.”

“Time for you to go,” the Jedi said, waddling over to him. “At an end, our time together is.”

Ageless thought he had heard him wrong. “I...I don't...what?”

“Time for you to go,” Yoda repeated.

“But…why? I…” He shook his head, and wiped sweat from his horns and brow. “I don’t understand. Have I done something wrong? What’s the—?”

“Look at your hand.”

“Look at my—”

Ageless looked at the hand that held his stick, his prop lightsaber. It looked perfectly normal, except for a single tongue of green flame rippling along his fingertips. The green flame was there for only two or three seconds, then snuffed out.

He looked at Yoda. “The stoic flame?”

“Yes. Burns inside you, it does. No more can I teach you. I have showed you how to open the door. You have found your ability to Attune. Your choice, it is, what you do with that knowledge from here on." Yoda coughed into his hand. "And," he added between harsh, wheezing breaths, "I am dying."

* * *

IN ORBIT ABOVE DAGOBAH

Old Miser stepped into the cockpit and looked over Vicious One’s shoulder. Through the transparisteel window of their Lambda-class shuttle the Maerovian, they could see the gloomy green planet below, its dayside barely lit by its pale, inadequate star. “This place is death,” said Miser. “You can smell it.”

Vicious glanced over his shoulder at Old Miser. The Human was what the Wookiees would call a “death-philosopher.” Thoughts of death and death processes occupied a large portion of Miser’s thoughts. Vicious could smell it on the Human at all times, but Vicious, though he had separated himself from his people on Kashyyyk thirty years ago, still shared many of the Wookiees' views, and saw death as something deserving of greater reverence. Death was not something to be sought or challenged or defied, but something to prepare for, so that you died well when the time came.

But Vicious worked well with both Old Miser and Saber Unsheathed; wherever one had a weakness, the others filled that gap and buttressed the others. Vicious let the Human and the Twi’lek do most of the tactical work and planning the approach to the target, but it was his job to plan the hunt. So when Miser said, “Deploy the probe droids,” Vicious already had his hand on the deployment switch.

Six probe droids launched and headed for different orbits. They would move at great speed, sending out active sensory pings, searching for any sign of something approaching technological advancement. On a planet like Dagobah, it ought to be easy to find machines emitting electronic signals.

In less than an hour, one of the probes, marked 001-a, had identified one or two suspect readings just north of the planet’s equator. The other probe droids altered their speeds and trajectories to rendezvous with that 001-a, and together they began their descent, practically burrowing through Dagobah’s dense atmosphere.

Miser manned the sensors. Saber took over in the pilot’s seat. Vicious headed to the rear of the ship to perform the Wookiee War Song ritual and summon the favor of his warrior ancestors.

* * *

They sat by the fire in Yoda’s hut, neither of them speaking. Ageless looked into the flames, vaguely searching for the stars his grandmother promised him were there. “You know,” he said, “for most of my time here, I thought I was actually in a dream. But it was a dream I wanted, so I decided to participate in it. Kind of like when you’re flying in your dreams, and even if you know it’s not real, you decide you’ll go along with it. Because how often will you get to feel that sensation? But now that I’m leaving, I feel the reality of what I had here. A precious resource.”

“A resource?” said Yoda, slowly lowering himself onto the edge of his bed.

“You.”

Yoda’s ears perked up, and he gave a playful laugh, which ended in a cough. “Oooh! Is that all I am? A simple resource, am I?” Abruptly, he reached out with his cane and thwacked Ageless on his horns, and Ageless blinked in surprise. Yoda laughed at his confusion. “A resource, he says.”

“You know what I mean. You’re a well of knowledge, and you’re just sitting down here in the middle of nowhere, wasting away. I have to ask before I leave…”

“You want to know why.”

Ageless nodded. “Yes. Someone with your power…you could do so much. You’re teaching Luke Skywalker so I have to assume you’re at least on the side of the Rebellion. With your power, you could help them immensely.”

Yoda sighed and shook his head. “What know you of power? Assume, you do, that I am ‘just sitting here wasting away.’ Doing nothing.” He sat his cane to one side. “But couldn’t it be, Ageless Void, that there is another plan at play? A plan that does not involve the Rebellion, but between myself and others, to ensure that the Jedi can one day return?"

Ageless squinted. “What plan?”

Yoda laid down in his bed, and pulled his blanket over him. He seemed to be struggling so Ageless reached over to help him pull the blanket up to his neck. “Just as the Sith kept to the shadows for thousands of years and planned in secret to take over the galaxy, perhaps also we last Jedi can take a play from their book, and plan in secret to save the galaxy. Learn from our mistakes, we must. Never too old to change, we must be, or else the Sith Imperative will be realized.”

Ageless finished tucking the Jedi Master in, then looked up at him. “What Sith Imperative?”

“Wondered, have I, when you would ask why Darth Vader and his Emperor wish to rule the galaxy so. Waiting, have I been, for it to dawn on you. It appears I must put the question in your brain. Why do you think the Sith have done what they’ve done?”

Ageless shrugged. “To rule. To have ultimate power.”

Yoda coughed into his hand. “Yes, but why? Why would two people desire such power? How could they have existed in secret, their conspiracy completely unseen, and then sprung a trap so deadly that none saw it until it was too late?”

Ageless had never considered this. He had always assumed the answer was so obvious it never needed to be questioned.

“The Sith Imperative is to control everything, to bathe the galaxy in the Dark Side, to make everyone beholden to them. But perhaps they do not even know the reason that drives them. The force that drives them.”

Ageless thought for a moment. “The Dark Voice?”

“No. Merely a facet of their power, the Dark Voice is, a secret co-conspirator that perhaps none but Palpatine himself has suspected, and perhaps even then only in his most private moments. Hear it clearly, few are able. Heard it often in her dreams, Shreya did.”

“Did she ever find out what it was?”

“I don’t know,” Yoda said, closing his eyes and rolling over in bed. “Ask her, perhaps you should.”

For another hour Ageless sat there mulling that over. Perhaps even two hours passed. At some point he became aware of the stillness of the air inside the hut. The fire had almost totally gone out and it was getting cold. Ageless looked at the small, snoring Jedi Master, and wondered at the lonely existence he must've had, after having presumably lived for ages among other Jedi, having seen the Republic at its height, and then watched it decay and fall. A life of constant fellowship, and now he was nothing but an old hermit on a swamp-ridden world few had ever heard of.

“Thank you,” Ageless whispered. He didn’t know if Yoda could hear him, or if he was asleep, but he said it anyway. Ageless started to crawl out of the hut.

“When facing the Dark Side, you are,” Yoda whispered back to him through the darkness, “remember all that you’ve learned. Remember that you must face a lifetime of resisting it. Take what discipline the Empire taught you, what power Shreya conveyed to you, and shroud yourself from the Dark Side, and behold the beauty of the Light. The ik’tra’zihm has unlocked what Shreya embedded in you. Up to you now, the rest is. Beware the Dark Side always. Anger, fear, aggression...the Dark Side are they. Easily, they flow. Thankful, am I, that I met you, and that I met Shreya. Tell her I said so, if you see her. And may the Force be with you both. Always.”

Ageless nodded. “Can I ever repay you?”

“Just behold the Light,” Yoda said. “And when ready, are you, pass on what you have learned.”

"Will I ever see you again?"

After a long, silent pause, Yoda said, "Not in this life, no."

The moment of poignance seeped into him and he tried to think of anything else that needed to be said. But soon he heard Yoda snoring again, and then crawled out of the hut for the last time. Ageless walked across the swamp, breathing it all in. For a time all he did was pace the area, looking over this place that had somehow become a home to him, despite the fact he had not been here very long. R4, R-3PO and TRD-5 were all waiting for him at the campfire beside the Curse’s loading ramp.

“How are you, sir?” asked the protocol droid.

Ageless looked back at Yoda’s hut. All the windows were darkened. He felt like walking back in there and telling the old fellow just one more time what all this had meant to him. Ageless did not have all the answers he sought, but he had never felt this level of rejuvenation, like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders and blinders had been removed from his eyes.

“I’m fine, Threepio.”

“Shall I prepare a meal? Or are you ready to sleep for the night?”

“Neither.” He looked at the droids, his only constant companions for this last year. “I want you guys to start loading up. We’re leaving.”

R4 gave a withering tweet. It sounded of concern.

“Is everything all right, sir?”

Ageless patted the protocol droid's shoulder as he headed toward the Curse’s ramp. “It’s fine, Threepio. Everything’s fine. We’ve spent enough time here. Let’s get back to Phaeda before the boys at the IIS begin to suspect something.”

The droids began breaking down camp, and Ageless helped. He gathered up the box filled with the holoprojector and holovids of his grandmother performing the ritualistic dance. Take what discipline the Empire taught you, what power Shreya conveyed to you, Yoda had said. Was it true? Had his grandmother transferred some of her power into him, where it had lain dormant all this time, waiting for Yoda to awaken it?

“We are all set, sir,” said R-3PO from the top of the cargo ramp. The engines were already whining as they cycled up. “Is there anything else we left behind?”

Ageless looked out across the swamp. “Only my ignorance," he muttered.

“Sir?”

As he carried his travel kit up the ramp, Ageless paused halfway, and took one more look back at the hut where he had received an awakening. Shroud yourself from the Dark Side, and behold the beauty of the Light.

Ageless was about to close the cargo ramp when R4 came rolling up beside him, whistling excitedly. “What is it?”

R-3PO was trotting right behind the astromech. “Arfour says we should get going. He says his scanners have picked up some unusual readings.”

“What kind of readings?”

R4 trilled worrisomely.

“He says it’s a resonance bounce-back of some sort, conducive to the sorts of readings one would get from intense scanning, possibly energy waves having a reactive effect on the high metal content in the local flora. He says the patterns are reminiscent of Imperial probe droids, but he rules out any use of Vipers on the planet.”

Ageless’s paranoia went up a notch. “Could it be old? Possibly some of the tech left over when the Farseer came apart in orbit? Maybe some parts of it crashed here, or some scanner droids."

“Arfour doesn’t rule it out as a possibility. Still, to be on the safe side…”

“Understood.”

Ageless stepped inside and hit the panel to close the ramp, putting Dagobah, and its dreamscape, behind him. His goal now was to return to Phaeda and await instructions from the Voice of Ether, but his mind was also made up about what to do after that.

Yoda had bid him to visit his grandmother on Dathomir, and to pass on what he had learned. Ageless did not like being in debt to anyone. He would settle up with both commandments.

* * *

IN ORBIT ABOVE DAGOBAH

The Maerovian was now in high orbit, far outside the scanner range of most small vessels. The probe droids had identified a faint signal on a northern continent that smacked of an engine’s drive emissions, as well as an energy signature conducive with output from repulsor generator. It was impossible to locate the exact position, Dagobah’s dense foliage was of complex make, it seemed, and messed with scanners. Also, the planet’s magnetic field appeared to go through seasonal disruptions, and right now was one of them.

Saber Unsheathed, the red-skinned Twi’lek, had come into the Kingdom by way of the Nest, like all the other Kingdom operatives, but before the Nest, he had been a tactical officer for his stormtrooper unit. During his trooper years, he'd never seen action, his skills were far too precious, and he was kept far away from enemy lines as he conducted operations remotely. The three-man team of theirs had no central leadership, and yet he was sort of the unofficial guide for everything they did—if something felt tactically off to him, neither Old Miser nor Vicious One would proceed.

The operation needed to have Saber’s full blessing.

“It’s him,” he said.

Miser looked up from his sensor station. “You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“How can you tell?”

Saber pointed to one of the sensor feeds from the probe droid identified as 004-a. “Look at the EM signature from the ship’s braking radiation,” he said, referring to the radiation produced by the sudden slowing down or deflection of charged particles passing through matter. “Those level of emissions are about right for a YT model. And look at the air-crest as it approaches the upper ozone layer, it’s exactly the kind you’d expect when a YT breaks atmo.” He sighed. “But there’s more to it. I cannot say for sure, but it all feels too perfect.”

Miser gave a nod of assent. “Then I guess Vicious won’t get a real ground-based hunt, because it looks like the ship’s already lifting off.”

“Too bad for him, but we can cut that ship off before it reaches lightspeed.”

“Do we call the Voice of Ether, let command know?”

Saber gave it a moment’s thought. “No. If we’re right, they’ll know soon enough. But on the off chance we’re wrong, we don’t want to look stupid. And if we send out a message now, it's possible our quarry will pick up on our signal emission and locate us, then the jig is up. Let’s capture him first, then alert the Voice.”

“Agreed.”

Since Saber had the flight controls, he set the course himself, and announced over intercom to Vicious in the back, “Sorry to interrupt your War Song ritual, my friend, but we have a slight change of plans. We’re going to cripple his drives, then perform a boarding action. Expect heavy resistance. If it’s him, I don’t imagine he’ll go easily.”

Dagobah tilted in the forward view as they banked hard to port and began an intercept course.