Chapter 2: Jada

Jada Sanddancer stood up and peered through her binoculars and looked at the desert. Still there, still flat, still nothing around as far as the electronic eyes could see. Smiling, she lowered the binoculars and knelt back down to work some more on the vaporator.

Scrubbing the metal piece for the third or fourth time, she looked more closely at her reflection in one of the round metal pieces in the vaporator’s innards. She didn’t mind having her red hair piled underneath her desert hat, the long cloth shield draped from the back of her cap over her neck and shoulders. She was wearing her favorite sunglasses, the ones with the lenses that flipped up and down. They were flipped up now, as she looked for the wire that must have come loose and kept the vaporator from bringing its daily allotment of water from the sparse cloud cover.

“Now, where are you, you little devil?” she mumbled to herself, following a trail from battery to node and around again inside the vaporator as she looked for the broken link. She pushed a lock of red hair out of her face and scratched her freckle-filled nose. “Now, we don’t have a broken semiconductor here. Maybe it’s the condenser coupling...well!”

The break was very well hidden. The break wasn’t just a break, though. She brought a small cylinder the size of her thumb up to her right eye. After a few seconds looking through magnifier there was no doubt.

The line wasn’t just broken.

It had been cut, either with a clipper or with something as effective as those glowing swords the Jedi used to use before they’d been extinguished for treason.

Usually it took Jada only a few seconds to a few minutes to find a problem with the machines her family owned and used to farm water out of the hot Tatooine sky. This time it had taken over fifteen minutes and three visits to her tool bag in order to diagnose and fix the issue. By the time she was finished she was sweating from the heat of the two desert suns, the shades of her sunglasses flipped down in order to cut down on the glare beating down on her.

She gave a quiet grunt of satisfaction as she mag-bolted the outer plate on the vaporator and stood up. She wished her family could afford an actual aircar at times like this, one with cooling tech inside.

Two minutes later she’d packed her tools and was flying along the desert sands in her speeder bike, clouds of sand billowing up behind her. She’d just kicked the bike into high gear when her comlink sounded off.

“This is Jada,” she said, speaking into the small, thumb-sized communicator she held in her right hand.

“Hey, honey,” the voice said into her ear. Though scrambled a bit by the wavejammer, it was unmistakably her father.

“Hi, Da. Just fixed the vaporator.”

“I know, the remotes over here say the flow is going at a normal rate again. What happened?”

“Da, I seriously think someone’s trying to sabotage us.”

“Who’d want to do that?”

“I dunno, Da. The Hutts, maybe? The condenser coupling was broken, but it didn’t look like just a wear-and-tear; it was a cut job, and by someone who could do very precise work.”

Da paused on the other end. “How precise?”

“I had to jury-rig one of my soldering guns to get in far enough. It was a small space, not something a joyriding vandal could do. Too small for most adult hands to get to unless they had a lot of spare time and knew just what they were doing.”

“So, no chance it was just worn out? And no chance it was just some punk trasher out of Mos Eisley?”

“Not unless their hand was as small as little Wormie over on the Lars farm.”

“Jada, you’ve got to stop blaming that little fellow for everything that...”

“I’m serious, Da! When that little kid walks into a room...”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“I know, I know. You saw things fall off the shelves. Look, just make a cursory check of the other vaporators in the line and head back home. Your mother’s already started to worry.”

“Understood, Da. I’ll be home in an hour if all goes well. Out.”

Jada drove off, kicking her bike into an even higher gear once she was out in the clear dune sea again. Over the next half hour she examined another half-dozen vaporators, finding no issues with any of them. Finally finished, she swooped her bike around and pointed it home to the Sanddancer moisture farm.

Then, she noticed she was being followed.

Even though she was going fairly fast, her bike was built for durability, not speed. When she first spied the flashes of sun-on-metal behind her in her rear-view, she waited nearly a full minute before she risked a look back over her shoulder.

She’d heard too many stories around campfires of what happened to girls alone in the Jutland Wastes. And even though all those stories happened at night when the Sandpeople were up and about, she didn’t want to take a chance.

Wishing again that her family were wealthier, this time rich enough to afford a scanner for her bike so she could learn a little more about her new friends, Jada tried to lose them in the tracks and rockier outcroppings of the wastes.

No good. They were better than your standard wastrel joyriders. She’d grown up traveling these areas, first riding on her Da’s bike with her little-girl arms wrapped around his waist, and later racing her brothers. She’d learned a number of useful tricks for losing unwanted attention out here, and how to tell a joyrider from a serious threat.

Her pursuers quickly proved themselves to be in the second category. She parked behind dunes, spun through sharp turns on rock trails, and a host of other tricks that would have lost the two bikes behind her if they were just playing tag.

They were good. They were threats. And they were still following her.

Going home wasn’t the smartest of ideas, either now. Leading these creeps to her home could bring trouble on her whole family.

“Da?” she spoke on her comlink, trying to ignore the sand as it kicked up against her tinted glasses.

“Yes, little one. What do you need?”

“A bit of firepower, Da. I’ve got some hitchikers on my tail, and I can’t shake them. Any chance for some help? There’s two of them and one of me- I don’t like those odds.”

“Say no more, Jada. I’ve already dispatched Lar and Zed. They’re checking out the North line, but they could meet you at the canyon floor in... Lar says five minutes. Can you outrun them for five more minutes, Jada?”

“Easy, Da.”

“Alright. One more thing. Switch to channel four.”

“That’s the public channel, Da. They’ll hear everything we say.”

“I know. Just do it. I’m going to say some things that won’t make sense; you just stick to the plan, savvy?”

“’kay, Da...”

Jada turned a small dial on the right steering arm of her bike, flicking it several clicks to the right.

“Da, can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, little one.” His voice was no longer encumbered by the scrambler they used to keep their conversations private, and now sounded clear as if he were sitting next to her. “Listen, your brothers are going to meet you on the canyon floor. They’re going to be in hiding. Lar has the new photon blaster we repaired attached to his bike, and Zed’s bringing his hand cannon. They’ll be in hiding on the canyon floor, ready to blast those two who are following you if they get cute. You copy?”

“Copy that, Da. On my way. ETA is two minutes.”

Jada smirked. Her Da was getting smarter as he got older! By saying it on the open channel, there was a good chance her pursuers had heard every word of the last exchange. If they were smart, they’d break off pursuit and run away, finding something else to relieve their boredom.

But they didn’t. She heard their engines whine louder as they kicked their own bikes into a higher gear.

Jada swallowed. It was unlikely they hadn’t heard- most bikers had open-channel comlinks switched on in case there was trouble. If they heard that her two big brothers were on the way and armed, it meant that either a) the two following her were phenomenally stupid and had a death wish, or b) they had a big enough reason to follow her that it was worth risking getting blasted over.

Then, as she neared the opening of Beggar’s Canyon, something interesting happened. She saw in her rearview that the bikes split up, each one picking a path to a high ridge above the canyon. Jada chuckled. Whoever was chasing her may be good riders, but they couldn’t be locals. Anyone raised out here knew those paths seemed obvious, but dead-ended less than a quarter mile up the ridge.

And, while those creeps were on their way up there to try and avoid her brothers, she knew that they’d be waiting up there for them. Well, one of them, anyway. Those two clowns were acting dumber by the second! Out here, you never, ever split the group, especially in the Jutland wastes! All it took was one hit from a sandperson’s gaffi stick, and it was all over.

She parked her bike in the center of the canyon floor and waited, pretending to look for her brothers even though she knew exactly where they were.