Chapter Six
Jedi Sentinel: Cult of Fear
“Do you want to hold her?”
Xen couldn’t believe this was happening. He failed to hold back his tears as he welcomed the newborn into his arms. Her adorable, upturned nose was enormous for a Sullustan, but quite petite for a human. Her cheek flaps were barely perceptible, but her ears were like sensor dishes. Xen couldn’t have been more proud.
Her father smiled down at her with Xen’s own face. In fact, Family Man Xen was identical to him in every way — save his powder blue sweater vest — but it wasn’t his fashion sense that concerned Xen in that moment. “Who’s the, um…” he struggled to ask.
“Taos, of course,” Family Man Xen replied casually.
Xen cried openly, then. A murmur of approval passed through the crowd of alternate Xens that had gathered around them. There was Jedi Master Xen, with his hands folded serenely over his white-and-gold robes. Behind him, Lawman Xen twirled his twin blasters and kept an eye out for bandits. Smuggler Captain Xen, resplendent in a gilded vest and matching gloves, idly counted a stack of credits while Wildlife Artist Xen put the finishing touches on his portrait of the child.
Dozens more filled the dimly-lit background: poor Xens and wealthy Xens, Xens with bright faces and Xens with haunted eyes, Xens with tools or blasters or lightsabers on their belts. And was that a darksider Xen lurking in the back? Lawman Xen probably had him covered.
Xen looked back down at his parallel universe daughter… but she was gone! He patted her empty blankets in disbelief. With panic rising in his chest, Xen searched the crowd for allies, but the Alternate Xens were dead. All dead. Their bodies now lay on twin rows of hospital gurneys that stretched into the darkness at this left and right.
Their disembodied voices rose in a thundering chorus…
“You could’ve had a family…”
“You could’ve had a ship…”
“You could’ve had wealth… power… respect… fame… love.”
Xen screamed into the void and a shadow rose in response. It raced toward Xen with terrifying speed, swallowing dead Xens as it came. He pushed both hands forward and The Force was with him. Space thickened, expanded. Gurneys and bodies flew toward the shadow like leaves in a gail, but the shadow kept coming.
It hit Xen like a pulse hammer, shattered his whole world.
Klaxons sounded in his ears and snapped him back to reality. Xen stood in a cave of black glass, like the inside of a geode, bristling with crystals. A pile of twisted, metal gurneys was still settling into place against the back wall. Fortunately, they were all empty.
The only other living soul lay behind Xen at his left, safely outside the blast area. Xen shot a glance through the cave’s mammoth security doors and into the engineering sector, checking for security droids. So far, so good.
By which, he of course meant very, very bad. The plan had been perfect, unassailable. Get in, get out, zero residual presence. Ostia had left a security door open for him and the map she provided led him directly to Accelerated Therapy: a set of reinforced blast doors from the original mine. Xen’s handmade data spikes had split them open as if cleaving the mountain in twain.
From there, he should have accepted Tika Aki’s tearful thanks before stuffing him in a recycling container and sending him safely out of the building, where OB-1 would have intercepted and freed him. Xen should have left the way he came before picking up his charge in his landspeeder. Next stop: a shuttle up to Taos’ waiting starship.
Instead, he’d allowed the dark side to provoke him into a costly mistake. He’d stood there in the cave — having a blasted vision! — until security scans finally noticed him. Now, the alarm was sounding and the clock was ticking. Nothing to do about it except roll with the punches. Probably literally.
There were no tears of gratitude from Tika Aki. He was being sedated by a slow drip of some inky, brackish liquid connected to his arm through a long, clear tube. Xen recognized his sandy blond hair and chiseled jaw from their previous encounter.
“I hope this isn’t medically necessary,” he apologized before plucking the needle from Tika’s arm and picking him up like a sleeping child. He must have cut a ridiculous figure — a short Sullustan holding a full-grown human in that manner — but the security droids sure didn’t find it funny.
Three mechanical men clanked to a halt directly between Xen and his escape route. Their beady, red eyes flared and focused on him. “Scanning…” they helpfully narrated.
“Rude,” the Jedi scolded them as he set down Tika and activated the signal jammer on his belt. The last thing he needed right now was another lawsuit. He stood his ground confidently, called on The Force, and reached across his body to draw his chosen weapon… a hydrospanner.
The droids traded looks, then the middle one stepped forward and tried to lay its vice-like mitts on Xen. “You are being detained for your own safety. Please do not resist.”
Xen resisted. He slapped the droid’s hand away with the butt of his “weapon” and climbed onto the brute’s back like a lizard-monkey. He stabbed down into the droid’s neck — once, twice, four times — then pulled its head clean off and threw the blinking cranium to one of its immediately confounded brothers.
The third droid chased Xen around the fusion reactor. Xen’s second self leapt up and through the cooling pipes with preternatural grace, while Xen slid underneath the emergency power diverter and let his pursuer pass by. Then, he hoisted himself onto the pipes and found an emergency release valve he could pry open, ambushing the droid with a stream of coolant.
Its plasteel chest groaned and cracked, making it vulnerable to a well-placed flying kick! The droid hit the ground and broke open like a geejaw egg. Xen disconnected its power supply and took its internal memory, just to be safe.
The last droid had given up on reconnecting its brother’s head and turned its attention instead to Tika Aki. It was returning the unconscious sap to Accelerated Therapy when Xen arrived. He pounced on its back like a wild tusk cat, kicked one of its legs out from beneath it, and dragged it to the ground. Tika fell from its arms and rolled safely across the floor.
The hydrospanner was a blur in Xen’s practiced hands, unfastening connections in the droid’s knees, wrists, and shoulders until it was just a helpless, angry torso. He made sure to recover the rest of the droids’ internal memory before pickup up Tika and resuming their escape.
The recycling container wasn’t going anywhere, not while the alarm was blaring, and Xen’s sabotaged security door would likely be guarded, now. He needed a new exit.
“OB-1, you there?” Xen shrugged Tika into a more comfortable position across his shoulders and kept moving while he waited for a reply. He’d barely gone ten meters before the pit droid’s binary squawk erupted from Xen’s communicator. “Thank the Maker! I need a new escape vector. Avoid cameras, if you’d be so kind… Take a right, up three floors, a left and a right. Thanks, buddy!”
It was the “up three floors” part that gave him the most trouble. A cacophonous line of security droids was already parading down the spiraling staircase when Xen burst through the door. They spotted him instantly. “Don’t go anywhere,” he cautioned his comatose charge, propping him up in the corner near the door.
The sound of the droids trampling toward him rattled Xen’s skull, so he resolved to take the fight to them. He stepped onto the handrail and launched himself across the gap, surprising the droids that had taken up the rear. He pulled the nearest one overboard and let it tumble down the center of the staircase, banging off the sides until it was reduced to scrap.
That was one. The rest assailed him with their metal fists, so he let go and hopped kitty corner to the next lowest flight, vaulting the handrail and onto the steps. He took the rest of them one at a time, smashing them into the plasteel walls and throwing them into their fellows until he was king of a very cluttered hill. Hastily, he extracted their internal memory, then slung Tika once again over his shoulders and climbed to the ground floor.
Was it a left and a right or a right and a left? They’d emerged into a service corridor thick with cables and the cloying miasma of commercial cleaners. “Can’t go wrong with right, right?” Tika didn’t have an opinion, so Xen zigged and zagged to an emergency exit. It was locked, what with the security breach and all, but one of Xen’s data spikes asked it real nice and the door zipped open. Xen dashed through to…
The top of an extremely steep and overgrown hill. The dark jungle yawned below, eager to devour them both. The emergency exit slammed closed with sickening finality. Xen had his data spike at the ready, but there wasn’t even a control panel on the outside. They were trapped.
“Well,” Xen craned his neck to make eye contact with Tika’s closed lids, “breathe deep, my friend. This’ll be the only fresh air either of us gets for quite a while.”
He was contemplating riding Tika’s carcass down the hill like a toboggan when the sleek, white lines of his landspeeder emerged from the undergrowth like a breaching whalebird. OB-1’s one-eyed dome peaked out over the dash.
“Above and beyond, buddy! Above and beyond.” He patted the pit droid on the head as he took the wheel. “I bet I could get you a job at the spaceport. How’s that sound?” OB-1 twittered his approval. “Yeah, this place is for squares.”
Xen opened the throttle and his kitten roared. She charged down the hillside, skimming ferns and blowing spirals of fallen leaves in her wake. Truthfully, Kitten wouldn’t have been his first choice for a flight through the jungle. He had to ski her up on one side to fit between trees more than once. OB-1 was suitably impressed.
No, Kitten was designed for straight-line acceleration — and looking mighty fine! — not for tight maneuvers over cramped terrain. Had he known, he would’ve brought something smaller, with a narrower profile, something just the two speeder-droids that swooped down on them like ravenous hummingbats! Their narrow, chisel-shaped chassis leaned aggressively forward over their long, finned stabilizer arms. Their blasters barked, repulsorlifts howled.
Xen flipped a few switches under the dash, jamming their comms and masking Kitten’s transponder. “Could you hold onto Tika for me?” the Jedi asked his droid before jumping a ravine. Blaster fire peppered the opposite bank. OB-1 draped himself over the seat and clamped down on Tika’s chest so he didn’t bounce out of the speeder when they landed.
The Force whispered its warnings, but Xen couldn’t dodge every volley, not in this jungle. A line of blaster fire bloomed across the speeder’s long hood and the right stabilizer belched smoke. Kitten lurched drunkenly; her wheel bucked beneath Xen’s fingers.
“Little help?” OB-1 whistled his objections. “I’ll take care of Tika. You repair that stabilizer!” Droids. “But take your time,” he yelled after the pit droid, who was already crawling across the hood. “I have an idea.”
Xen swung wide around a fallen tree, daring the speeder-droids to cut him off on the inside. When they took the bait, he decelerated and drew even, leaning into Kitten’s wobble and spinning her like a top. He reached behind him and nabbed Tika’s ankle just in time.
The landspeeder’s whirling corners knocked those droids dizzy. One wiped out and exploded against the trunk of a tree. The other circled around and accelerated, turning to cut across their vector. Blaster bolts tore up the jungle ahead of them.
Stabilizer or no stabilizer, stopping was not an option in a dogfight. Xen overpowered Kitten’s repulsorlift and leapt over the droid’s line of fire. It raced below them as Kitten tilted madly through the low canopy. Just in time, the right stabilizer kicked in and Xen was able to straighten her out for a landing.
OB-1 rejoined him in the cab, only slightly more sooty than before. “How much do you trust me?” Xen asked. Looked like the speeder-droid was dumb enough to try the same maneuver twice. “Yeah, well… you should trust me, this time. I got this.”
Once more, Xen overpowered and vaulted a stream of incoming fire, but this time he threw his friend out of the cab like a thermal detonator. Little guy squealed all the way down, but stuck the landing, spread-eagle on the speeder-droid’s chassis.
OB-1 started taking it apart in mid-flight. First, its rear stabilizer gave out, then sparks shot from the sensor array. It lost its left arm on a tall rock before face-planting in a dry creek bed.
Kitten drifted around the wreck so Xen could pick up his wingman. OB-1 was upside-down in the moss, but none the worse for wear. The Force levitated him back into the cab and Xen sped away. A plaintive string of beeps accompanied their departure.
“No,” Xen argued testily, “this definitely goes in the ‘More Trust’ column.”
Gatts was waiting for them, but thankfully not in that “You’re under arrest” kinda way. She’d agreed to take them up to Taos’ ship in the oldest mining shuttle Xen had ever seen. It sat at the foot of a dry waterfall; no telling which was older. Its single, dorsal wing rose up from the engine block, over a pair of thrusters so tiny, Xen wondered if they’d even break atmo.
The interior was only big enough for a half dozen passengers, which would be fine for the three of them. OB-1 hardly counted as a carry-on. To her credit, Gatts let Xen get Tika onboard and strapped into a seat before bending his ear.
“You can’t come back, you know,” she told him, sealing the door for effect. “They’ll be out for blood. No one in your life will be safe, including me.”
“I was careful, this time!” Xen whined, showing her his handful of droid memory. “They’ve got no proof it was me.”
“Who else are they gonna think it was?!”
Xen looked side-eyed at Tika. This would be an embarrassing time for him to wake up. “Thinking is one thing, Gatts. Proving is another.”
“They don’t gotta prove anything, Xen!” Angrily, she tossed her hat into the cockpit and followed it inside, started powering everything up. “They don’t need a judge or a jury. They can retaliate all on their own.”
He stood in the cockpit door, behind her. “I’m a Jedi, Gatts,” he reminded her. “I can protect my friends.”
She snorted humorlessly. “Yeah, sure. I’m serious, Xen. This is the last favor you’re getting from me. Have Taos drop you off somewhere nice and make a new life for yourself. That’s what you’re best at.”
“Gatts — “
A scream stopped their conversation cold. Tika Aki was out of his seat and wide awake, beating his fists against the shuttle door.
“Get us into the air,” he told Gatts. “I’ll handle this.”
He shut the cockpit door and approached Tika with open palms. “Hey, fella. Remember me from the other day?” He reached out with The Force and tried to share his inner calm with the wild-eyed former cultist. “I came back for you. Rescued you. You’re on your way to freedom.”
At first, Tika didn’t appear to hear him, just kept banging on the door, but then his strength gave out and he slid to the floor. “I thought I was free before,” he whispered through parched lips. “So many, many times. And every time, I’d wake in that cave, that tomb, that charnel pit.”
“I was there, too,” Xen assured him, “in the cave with you. I had my own vision, but believe me… we’re home free.” The shuttle lifted off, as if to prove his point.
“No, no,” the other man muttered, head in his hands. “I’m still there, I know it. I KNOW IT!!!” he spun around and punched the door, leaving a smear of blood from his knuckles.
The dark side still clung to him; Xen could feel it as surely as he felt the shuttle accelerating. “Getting you out wasn’t easy, Tika. There are blaster holes in my landspeeder that can attest to it. We’re taking you home.”
Tika let out a long, ragged breath. No telling how long he’d been holding it. “Thank you,” he sighed. Finally, the tears came. “Thank you.”
“Just sit tight, friend, and maybe strap yourself into a seat, huh?” Xen reopened the cockpit door and slipped into the copilot’s chair.
Gatts was skimming the Shimmersea, getting them nice and far from Hiatus before climbing to orbit. “I hear Batuu is nice,” she told him, not skipping a beat. “Can’t get much farther away from here than that. Probably won’t be far enough, but you never know until you try.”
“I’m coming back, Gatts. I’m not gonna let them win.”
“You really are the worst, Xen.” He knew she didn’t mean it. “Next time they come at you, I won’t be in your corner.”
That… she meant.
Written by Daniel Bayn
Cover image by Midjourney
