The Force Wills - Chapter 126

The thrumming beats and throaty singing of the Asagar band rumbled through the cockpit of the Omen.

I had the pilot’s seat folded into a reclining chair, with minimal control holos around me, content to just let the view of interstellar space surround me. The deep bass sounds thumped pleasantly into my montrals whilst I read a novel from a datapad as I waited.

The Omen was waiting at a rendezvous eight hours' travel beyond the Mijos system, right where the Koja Spur and the Nothoiin Corridor met. It was as random a spot as you could possibly get without throwing an RNG at the navicomputer.  

I put out of my mind how long I had been waiting and instead focused on the story, whilst also trying to parse the song lyrics of Asagar’s latest offering, ‘The Trooper’. It was obviously a reference to the current galactic war and everyone fighting in it, but their language combined with the way they sang made it quite difficult to hear every word of the song, with only every third or fourth being comprehensible. It was quite clear they were talking about the clones, but the band was not taking sides, merely singing about the general fate of a clone trooper.

How they were dying for a galaxy that just didn’t care to know them or their sacrifice, just so long as it didn’t involve them or bring the war to their doorstep.

I sighed as I focused on the heavy electric strings of the song instead, nodding my head in time with the beat.

I was doing all I could regarding the clones and in the dome of Clan Skirata on Mandalore that was finally starting to bear some fruit. The first procedures in reprogramming the biochips in the head of every clone had been successfully carried out just a week ago, as had a procedure for removing it entirely.

It had been done on a group of twelve volunteers from among the secretly rescued clones who now lived there, which numbered just under six hundred in total. It represented a full year of Skirata and Fulcrum’s combined efforts. It was just a drop in the bucket but secrecy didn’t allow for anything else.

The research into helping extend the clones’ life had at least also shown promise, which Kina Ha had been a great help in getting off the ground. Her flawless infiltration of Kamino just last month had greatly helped matters, liberating her people’s latest genetic techniques and bringing it back to Mandalore.

It would still take years of further research, but at least it wasn’t stalled completely anymore.

A chirping proximity alert pulled my thoughts to the present and out of my worries.

A slap on my chair brought it to an upright position and I re-enabled all the holo controls around me with the wave of a hand.

An ugly, boxy looking ship that was slightly smaller than the Omen had just dropped out of hyper and was burning to match relative velocity.

A quick sensor scan and database search showed it to be an old Corellian ship that hadn’t been manufactured for nearly eight centuries and looked to be from the early post-Ruusan era. It should’ve been a hunk of junk and barely spaceworthy, but I was reading quite impressive performance figures that were current with ships from just thirty years ago. Which wasn’t saying much, given how relatively little innovation there had been before the Clone war.

The ship’s transponder cycled from broadcasting itself as the Mistwraith, and now proclaimed itself the Dreadveil.

“About time,” I grumbled, jumping out of the chair and quickly got dressed into a new experimental outfit when I wanted to be more incognito.

I had already changed my facial patterning to a combination of circles and diamonds, whilst I had bit the bullet and gone through the pain of changing my lekku and montral color to a light brown on white.

As for clothes, a dark blue, one piece rugged swimsuit that would let me easily take a dip if I had to, combined with black figure hugging long pants, knee guards and combat boots. Finally a belt and holster combo for a new WESTAR blaster pistol and my two new lightsabers I had built on the three day trip here.

The synthetic kyber in them resonated in an angry red, but that couldn’t be helped in the time available. If I had another week, I could purify them, turn them into white kyber but it wasn’t necessary and felt too much like vanity.

I might have the Darksaber always with me, leaving M8 with a convincing enough fake, but there was no way I could use it without potentially giving up the whole deception game.

That done I swiped the controls for the com system.

“Omen to Dreadveil. You’re late.”

“Not all of us are blessed with the latest starships, Tano,” said Asajj Ventress in her high lilting voice that was just an inch away from either sounding like the classic harpy witch or a seductive black widow.

“I suppose not. Anyway, given the shape of that bucket of bolts, you’re going to have to maneuver to the Omen’s ventral port if we’re going to dock.”

“My pilot is good enough to know that already, Tano. See you in a moment.”

A quick pulse with the Force was enough for me to sense that Asajj did not come alone, another Nightsister was with her but not one I was really familiar with. It also let me pick up that there was a significant concentration of ichor on that ship.

“Interesting,” I muttered, enabling the ventral docking collar and walking out the cockpit.

A quick trip down the ladder to the lowest level, where the Omen’s engineering deck was located and the fusion power core thrummed merrily in low consumption standby mode.

I reached to the deck floor and lifted up a large panel, tapped in a few codes on a panel and the large circular airlock hissed and irised open. A small section of the ventral armor opened and allowed the docking collar to extend outward to the slowly rising Dreadveil who was maneuvering its own dorsal collar to link up.

The two ships shuddered as the collars linked and caught each other.

The outer door opened and I had a brief look at the Dreadveil’s own outer door before that split apart with a chunky thud of durasteel hull.

Then I was looking down on the neutral visage of Asajj Ventress, who wryly looked at me with assessing eyes.

“Nice look, Tano,” she eventually said with a grudging nod.

“Good to see you too, Ventress. Do come aboard.”

I stepped back to let the former Sith assassin, now Nightsister of Dathomir do a small Force Jump to easily get into the Omen.

Her preferred clothing hadn’t changed much since I last saw her, nimble shoes with wrapped legs up to her mid thigh, with a figure hugging red mini-skirt and tunic outfit with a hood, but there were additions to her arms and chest, cured rancor hide gauntlets and a chest piece, along with flairs on the shoulders that reminded me of Talzin’s outfit. She also had two brand new lightsabers on her hips, with hilts that were much straighter than her previous ones, made of chromium and covered with bane back spider leather which ended in elegantly carved Nydak tusks, giving them an ivory sheen.

It gave them both elegance and a beautifully cruel appearance. I could imagine her using the reverse end of the hilts to easily stab someone. Yet it was the kyber inside them that was the most astonishing thing.

They were quite powerful and old in a way that I could only conclude that Kina Ha had allowed Asajj access to a cache of kyber crystals that the ancient kaminoan had somewhere in the galaxy.

“One moment before we go,” Asajj sighed and she reached into the Force, gesturing downward with her hand and lifting something.

A large cylinder that stood at chest height, made of durasteel, transparisteel and plastics, that glowed with the green ichor contained inside rose up through the joined airlocks.

My eyes widened as I felt it up close…

It had to be at least 150 liters of the stuff.

Asajj guided it easily to rest a few feet away from the airlock.

I knew better than to touch the stuff, but my Prescient Shroud was based on Nightsister techniques and the gaseous form of ichor was naturally caught up in it, seemingly pulled in like it was a magnet to me.

Asajj tsked in annoyance and made a slight beckoning gesture with two fingers, which grabbed a hold of the ichor and sent it swirling back into its container.

“Figured this would happen. You’re like a neophyte-sister Tano, get some control would you.”

I took a deep breath and stepped back firming the Shroud further and focusing on only covering myself, Asajj and the Omen, which now included a bloody battery of ichor that would’ve liked nothing better to also pour into the technique with a giddy eagerness.

“Sorry about that, I might have Mother Talzin’s early lessons, but practical reality is a different thing.”

Asajj gave me a stern look. “Barely acceptable but it’ll do. Now, get us undocked, we can’t waste time having chit-chat, Tano.”

In the interest of time, I used the Force to speed things up, liberally using TK to push buttons and massage the systems with technometry.

The airlocks closed and cycled. Retracting supernaturally and the Omen’s ventral hull sealed up.

The Dreadveil detached itself and immediately maneuvered around and after a brief acceleration shot itself into hyper.

“Your pilot is in a hurry,” I commented.

“She has more to do than just ferry me here, Tano.” Asajj gestured toward the ichor vat and it literally grew four mechanical legs out of its underside with green light. Then it began walking on its own down the engineering deck towards us.

“Nice,” I grinned.

She rolled her eyes, “A minor trick, where would be a secure place for the catalyst?”

“Troop deck, there are mountings where we can bolt it down if we have to.”

One quick levitation up the ladder and that catalyst vat was walking towards the front of the Troop deck. Asajj transmuted the legs again to properly clamp onto the anchor points in the floor.

“The ichor is for Maul then?” I guessed.

She nodded, “My skills are too undeveloped to use only my personal ichor as a catalyst for the healing that Maul will require, therefore we must bring such a large amount with us. The Nightsisters will often do the same when our most powerful talents are required off world to complete a mission.”

“Ah, so the ship will stay relatively safe in orbit, letting the sister use it as both battery and catalyst?”

“In simplified terms, yes.”

We climbed up to the command deck and I hopped into the pilot seat, gesturing for Asajj to take the co-pilot spot. She was understandably a bit rusty given she’d just spent close to a year in the mostly primitive environment of Dathomir and the Omen’s cockpit was mostly interactive holograms. I felt her lean on the Force for guidance in a way that made me internally cheer. Kina Ha’s guidance and teaching had been just the ticket to get Asajj on a positive course in her life.

My hands twirled and tapped through the hyperdrive interface.

“Lotho Minor in twenty nine hours,” I announced, and pushed forward on the holo interface.

The Omen streaked forward and plunged into hyper.

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Living on the same ship as Asajj was a surprisingly ordinary affair.

The Omen wasn’t so small that we were forced into close quarters. She chose to either spend it in the cockpit, learning the modernized systems, using a datapad to go onto the Holonet and browse her interests or went down into the Troop deck to meditate in front of the ichor vat.

The latter was interesting for me to watch as she would practice ichor manipulation - simply pulling the gaseous form straight through its containment vessel and letting it dance and orbit around her body. I was half-tempted to join her, but I was no Nightsister and the ichor would leave traces of itself on me to a degree that would be immediately obvious to even the most neophyte apprentice Jedi, even if they didn’t know what it was precisely.

My accidental exposure and manipulation was going to take days of meditation and cleansing to figuratively ‘scrub off’.

The next morning, according to our own body clocks at least, I prepared a proper breakfast to my own sensibilities and placed a tray of it next to Asajj as she meditated in front of the ichor vat.

“Tano, what’s this?”

“Breakfast,” I said obviously, sitting down with my own tray in my lap and beginning to cut my cooked Naboo golden pheasant - yet another delicacy meat that I had rescued from the pantry of the Separatist's Dawn and transferred to the food reserves of the Resolute to be used on special occasions.

“Yes, obviously,” she frowned, giving her tray a skeptical sniff. Only for her eyebrows to rise in surprise when the smell agreed with her and I could just about pick up a hint of emotion in those ice-blue eyes.

She grumbled under her breath and picked up the tray to begin eating.

“Where did you get this food, Tano?” she asked immediately after the first few bites.

“Plunder from the Separatist's Dawn after we captured her. Sent the captain’s valuables to the family, but I thought it’d be a shame just to leave the food stores in stasis, given its rarity and that Resolute’s crew could use a bit of a spice in their diet.”

“Holonet was touting the victory everywhere, you’d think the war was won given how they were speaking,” she scoffed.

“We can thank COMPOR for that, but let’s not talk about the war. Could you indulge my curiosity, because it’s been frustrating me. Your new lightsabers, what kyber crystal is that?”

Asajj’s mouth quirked in a half-smile. “Pontite.”

I slapped my forehead in annoyance and exasperation, “Thank you. It’s been on the tip of my tongue for hours.”

Asajj sighed, unclipped one of the hilts and handed it over to me.

That gesture alone struck me as a true testament for just how far the dathomirian had come.

I accepted the hilt and immediately felt that it wouldn’t be ideal to use in a pinch. The grip just didn’t feel comfortable, the resonance from the kyber inside was off and while it wasn’t outright hostile to me holding it, any techniques I tried to channel through the blade would be rather weak. I could with time and a bit of brute force make it easier to use if needed, but that was just speaking in hypotheticals.

I held it parallel to the floor and ignited it.

The yellow blade that burst to life with the characteristic snap-hiss was an expected if pleasant confirmation.

Inside the core of the energy blade was a faint hint of another color beginning to rise… interesting.

I let the blade retreat into the hilt and handed it over. “It’s very well done, Asajj.”

She nodded in acceptance of the complement and just continued eating.

“So who do you think the enemy has sent?” I asked, drinking some tauntaun milk.

“Savage would certainly be a candidate and it would fit the Sith mindset and tradition of killing someone close, but he would’ve warned Mother Talzin if that was the case. No, this assassin will come from Palpatine’s side of the war, someone we haven’t encountered before.”

I didn’t even need prescience to know that one. Staring down the probability line I found a figure of shadow, someone who blended in very well, who was…

“It’s one of his Inquisitors,” I said with faint surprise. That he was already sending them out before the rise of his New Order was a fairly significant change, or could it be that he had always sent them out, but only those that were best at stealth in the Force.

“Inquisitors?”

“His own order of Force Users, steeped in the Dark Side, only given just enough training and strength to accomplish the goals he sets, but are disposed of if they show signs of growing beyond those limits. Most of them come from the ranks of disillusioned Jedi initiates, failed padawans or even fallen Jedi.”

I closed my eyes in frustration, it was difficult to see this Inquisitor. Not because she was under a Shroud, but because…

“Shabla! She has frakking Invisibility, the Force Cloak.”

“That will be frustrating to fight,” she admitted, then smirked. “Luckily for you, Tano, you have a Nightsister of Dathomir and a former Sith assassin on your side.”

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The Omen emerged from hyper just outside Lotho Minor’s mass shadow.

I got a bad taste in my mouth just from looking at it and sensing it through the Force was even more unpleasant. The planet reeked of decay and death, with only minor pockets of life being sustained in a bastardized decrepit cycle. The choking atmosphere was a light brown and black smog that didn’t let you see any landmass shapes from orbit. On sensors, there were hundreds of garbage scow ships adding further to the titanic mountains of junk, with dozens arriving every other minute and leaving with empty holds.

“We’re going to at least have to wear rebreather masks,” I said with slight horror as the sensors showed an atmospheric analysis. “There’s also literal acid rain down there.” I was already missing my beskar’gam. “I have a few sets of spare katarn armor that should protect us from that.”

“If we’re going to fight down there we can’t wear clunky commando armor that doesn’t even fit us, Tano. I can lay a minor kinetic shield over each of us that should protect us.”

“With no concentration or focus required on your part?”

“Yes, now hand me the ship controls, I can guide us to Maul’s general location.”

Not wanting to spend days trying to use the sensors, which would probably be useless given the mess down there, I readily complied.

She took hold of the yoke on her side and after closing her eyes briefly, began a burn for a course to the northern hemisphere of the planet.

Soon we were in a low orbit as she made minor adjustments, before abruptly nosing down into an atmospheric entry vector.

After three minutes of being enveloped in a plasma sheath the Omen slowed down enough and sliced through the upper atmospheric clouds that were an unholy conglomeration of water and toxic pollutants.

“The hull is definitely going to need a good servicing after we leave this place,” I grimaced, my mind already thinking ahead of where there would be a nearby repair station that would be off-the-grid enough for that purpose.

Asajj steadily brought the ship to a lower altitude, only turning abruptly to avoid a very thick bank of sulfurous cumulonimbus clouds. 

It was only when we were at six hundred meters that we broke through the lowest cloud level to actually see the surface with our own eyes and it was as horrible as could be imagined.

This was not just the garbage heap of the southern Outer Rim, but also served as the final resting place for pieces of scrap starship. Asajj had to hurriedly dodge the superstructure of what had been a huge freighter that stuck out of the ground like a huge partially buried carcass.

She pulled back on the throttle, bringing us to a crawling cruise of just under 80 kph.

“We’re definitely close, now we just need to find a landing spot around here,” she announced, scanning the area.

This was again easier said than done as conventional visibility was just under a kilometer around us before it was all washed out in a piss yellow haze.

I pushed my own senses out.

“There, 2200 meters at 313 degrees, it’s solid enough to support the Omen’s weight.”

Asajj turned the ship in that direction and sure enough a reasonable gap and plateau in the garbage hills appeared in view.

“That’s not exactly solid ground, Tano.”

“There is no solid ground on this planet, Ventress. You’ll only find clearings like these that are basically compacted garbage layers. I foresee this one holding.”

She was clearly reluctant but nevertheless began the landing sequence.

The Omen thumped and shuddered as it touched down as the garbage layer adjusted to the sudden weight being placed on it.

I quickly took over the controls, shutting down the engines and any lingering thrusters immediately, forgoing a few steps in the checklist in the interest of not disturbing the shaky ground we had landed on further.

With that done, I primed the ship’s grounded self-defense and security systems.

“Ready?”

Asajj regarded the area rendered in all its ugly detail by the holoscreens that surrounded us, “Yes, let’s go.”

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We made sure to use the ventral embarkation airlock elevator, as we didn’t want any contamination getting into the Omen.

I double-checked the seal on my full-face rebreather mask, breathed in and out as a final confirmation before hitting the control panel.

The elevator descended and we were hit with the full force of Lotho Minor’s atmosphere, not just in terms of its general toxicity but the wind was gusting at nearly 70 kph in the valley of literal garbage we had landed in. If that wasn’t bad enough, at the crest of nearly every garbage hill, fires were releasing smoke and being pulled to the side by the wind.

Barely a few seconds of exposure and I already felt like I needed to shower for a week.

We stepped off the elevator and I sent a signal for the Omen to fully secure itself.

Asajj took a few moments to get her bearings, before holding up her palm. Green ichor pooled in it briefly before resolving into a pulsing symbol in ancient Dathomiri, which vanished quickly.

“He is within three kilometers of us! Follow me!” she shouted over the wind.

She led the way towards a nearby garbage hill twenty meters in front of us, before we cut around it in what looked to be a well worn path.

We had barely walked a few hundred meters and had totally lost sight of the ship before our senses warned of a general danger, enough that we had to begin sprinting urgently and even vault over some garbage piles that had been blown into the path.

Crashing into view behind us were two giant four legged droids that were almost twenty meters tall.

Their mechanical feet crunched the garbage under them and their giant mouths came down to gulp up tons of it before it flared with blinding flame and heat, incinerating the garbage to its melting point and taking in the resulting molten products into itself.

These refuse incinerator droids had been released onto Lotho Minor centuries ago in an effort to control the levels of waste. A vain effort done in the hopes that at least some part of the planet could be reclaimed for normal civilization. 

Our sprint continued as we dodged what looked to be an entire ‘herd’ of the incinerator droids.

Their ancient programming had long since become so corrupted with errors and with no memory wipes being performed, it was a miracle that they still continued to function. They had long since gone ‘feral’ with the temperament of a rancor that had been denied its meal for too long.

With that danger behind us the wind calmed down somewhat to a minor breeze with only the occasional gust.

Asajj stopped in her tracks though as we threaded our way through two large piles of what had been ancient consumer electronics.

She made a sudden grasping gesture to the left and the Force twisted with a pull.

“Ahhh!” screamed a nasal voice in fright.

Ancient holoplayers and junk erupted as a four meter long anacondian emerged into the air under the pull of Asajj’s power.

“Ah, ah, let me go,” he whined as he writhed in mid-air, futilely trying to escape. The being was understandably filthy, its beige skin was almost black with soot and chemical stains creating an almost green network of splotches on its belly. It was also quite healthy in terms of weight, suggesting it did not lack for food, probably sustaining itself on spoiled food that was also dumped on the planet.

“Why are you following us?” Asajj sneered, adding a slight choking effect on the anacondan’s neck.

“Ug…ug… I- I- please- stop-”

She relented, “Speak!”

“Just-” he gasped, his beady eyes on either side of his head bulging slightly. “Just curious! That’s all. It’s so rare for anyone to land willingly here, except for the junk droppers and even they don’t get out of their ships. You’re clearly looking for something or someone. Maybe I can help? My name’s Morley.”

“Well met, Morley,” I said quickly before Asajj could say something nasty at the suggestion. “You clearly know the general area well, don’t you?”

“Of course, of course I do,” he said quickly and just from his tone and the general sense of his mind, I could tell that Morley was actually a few steps away from being literally crazy.

“Then you wouldn’t happen to have seen someone like this,” I said, pulling out a small projector from my pocket and bringing up an old rendering of Maul taken from palace security footage on Naboo.

Morley brought his head forward, squinting at the image. “Hmmm, a horned fella, looks quite scary. Well, there are some legends among the Junkers about what they call the ‘Horned One’. It’s said among them, many years ago, that from the rain of junk in the sky the Horned One fell and killed many of them, until the being collapsed from exhaustion.”

“Then what? And who are these Junkers?” Asajj sneered.

“The Junkers always stop the story there. As for who they are, they’re what passes for the natives of this planet. They eke out a living among the wastes, just like I do. They consider the junk of the world to be theirs and holy. Not for outsiders to use or take away.”

“And what sort of relationship do you have with them?” I asked curiously.

“You won’t see us sitting around a Lifeday campfire, at least, he he,” he chuckled nervously.

Asajj flung Morley away with a gesture onto nearby flat ground.

The anacondian immediately slithered out of view into the mass of junk, before he abruptly appeared again on another pile and looked at us with curiosity, cunning and a mild desperation.

He was also hungry.

“For a modest fee, I can be your guide to this place,” he suggested. “You did well in avoiding the Fire Feeders, but there are more dangers that I can help you safely avoid. Not all paths are safe for you two-leggers to walk on.”

“And what would you accept as payment, I doubt you have much use for credits on this world,” I pointed out.

“Really, Beweza?” Asajj shook her head, inventing an alias for me on the spot.

“He could be useful,” I shrugged.

“You clearly came in a ship, a ship with supplies of food, no doubt. Give me a month’s worth of rations and I’ll be your guide for as long as it takes to find the Horned One.”

“Two standard weeks of rations, it would be dangerous out amongst the stars with lower food reserves.”

“Three weeks,” Morley’s wide mouth smirked, showing off two rows of nasty spiked retention teeth.

“Three weeks then, we have a deal,” I sighed, faking reluctance. The Omen’s food stores had to be ready to potentially feed twelve hungry Mandalorians for months in an emergency. Morley’s appetite would make little dent in it.

“All right then,” Morley said with eagerness. “Follow me, two-legs!”

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Despite our new guide, Asajj was still the one who dictated our course. Occasionally using her ichor rune to get more precise readings on Maul’s position. The Dark Side on the planet cast just as bad a miasma as the pollution and very effectively hid any signature in the Force that Maul naturally had. Even if we had been using the Dark Side to look for him, I doubted his natural affinity for hiding his own presence would’ve waned, even in his madness.

Morley did prove his usefulness immediately when he pointed out unstable paths and garbage hills that were too dangerous to approach due to the volatiles and even areas of high radiation from unstable elements.

“I’m much more hardy to that than you two-legs, can even feel it tingling on my skin,” he commented as we took the long way around two large junk piles bristling with enough radiation to give our DNA a very bad time.

We emerged into a large clearing of compacted junk forming what was the local equivalent of a town square.

In small stacked shelters all around the perimeter short hunchbacked beings chatted with each other and immediately took notice of us.

The Junkers were strange amalgamations of both living flesh and junk which functioned as crude cybernetics for them. I sensed in appalled fascination their biology, which was also a similar amalgamation of various species. Whoever the junkers had been originally on Lotho Minor, they had a fascinating ability for adaptation. It was almost as if I was looking at the Borg, but minus the whole hivemind thing and assimilating everything for more uber technology.

The Junkers were clearly content with their lot and judging from what I sensed, they clearly didn’t appreciate our presence on their holy garbage.

They chittered to each other in a rapid alien tongue that I could hear but make no sense of, only the emotions and intent in the Force that they were radiating outwards brought some meaning.

“Oh, uh, I think they’re really cranky today,” Morley said nervously. “We better move through quickly.”

The hunchbacked junkers brought out improvised melee weapons of every variety, some of them even had bladed limbs crudely hewn into blades. They brandished it into the air and their chittering calls echoed over the wind. Their green glowing eyes from under their hoods glinted malevolently.

I felt Asajj’s thoughts snake towards my mind in a novel manner, clearly based on a Nightsister technique. It was rather icky, but given that it was based on ichor, not surprising it felt weird.

‘Put them to sleep, Tano.’

There were 94 junkers in the crude town square, most with melee weapons but some had improvised blasters of varying lethality.

I embraced some theatricality and made an expansive downward gesture, reaching out and throwing a Force Sleep that encompassed the entire town square.

My sense of their biology was not the best though and only 45 junkers dropped their weapons and collapsed into dreamless sleep.

Their still standing fellows didn’t appreciate it and a junker standing at the top of an arched beam raised its weapon, bellowing rapidly in the alien language.

“Whatever you did, you made them mad!” Morley slithered away rapidly out of sight.

‘Damn it, Tano!’ Asajj thought as she brought her lightsabers to bear, easily slapping a red blaster bolt straight back to the junker who had fired.

‘It’s not that easy, Ventress,’ I hissed in annoyance as I ignited a crimson lightsaber in my right hand, deflecting a shot before quick draw, snapshotting another blaster wielding junker with my WESTAR.

We both immediately flowed into standing back-to-back, slashing and shooting at the charging junkers.

I could’ve ended the fight quickly with a Force Wave, but that was utter overkill, especially considering that Sidious’ Inquisitor was undoubtedly watching us with interest at this point.

Despite that Asajj and I acted like a woodchipper against the oncoming junkers, there were only two of us and we were being attacked with a fanatical zeal.

Two Force Pushes cleared the bodies piling around our feet and sent them crashing into the oncoming horde that was rapidly thinning.

With some breathing room again, I fired three times rapidly with my WESTAR, targeting the junkers who were still sniping at us from range.

Two headshots and a body shot later and that threat was dealt with.

It was only when there were a handful of junkers left standing that some sense finally prevailed in what passed for their brains.

They wearily kept their weapons up and hurriedly retreated out of sight, practically vanishing to normal sight through cunningly hidden escape routes engineered right out of what seemed to be just walls of garbage that lined the town square.

“Wow,” marveled Morley, who slithered out of hiding from an empty shack. “That was some impressive fighting, especially that thing you did with your hands and they just went flying! If I get some hands, could I do that too?”

“No,” Asajj said flatly, extinguishing and holstering her lightsabers.

“Aww, pity. Ow, hey…arghh.”

She had him in a Force Grip again and hovered the anacondan closer. “Did you lead us here hoping they would kill us?” she asked dangerously.

“No, no, I swear,” he quickly denied. “It’s impossible to avoid the junker square, all the safe paths lead through here!”

“He speaks truthfully, Ventress,” I said, puzzling through the emotions of the snake-like alien. “Yet, I think he also used us as a gambit. You don’t like the junkers at all, you felt great satisfaction as we killed them.”

Morley sported a disturbing fanged grin, “What can I say? We’ve had our spats and they chase me away from town every time. An anacondian has to eat after all and they don’t like sharing.”

Asajj let the alien fall to the ground, uncomfortably reminded of her own past, “Whatever, we have to go north-west from here,” she gestured in the direction.

“On we go!” Morley cheered, slithering forward to the northerly exit of the square.

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We were barely a half-hour walk beyond the junker town, picking our way through tall hills of garbage, when the weather took a turn for the worse and a fine drizzle began.

Each drop hissed as it landed, chemically eating away at whatever material it landed on.

Asajj quickly slapped a hand on my chest and I felt the Force molded by her ichor around me.

My entire body glowed gaseous green for a moment before a constant kinetic shield wrapped around me, repelling each drop of dangerous acid rain.

She wrapped one around herself a moment later.

“Thanks,” I nodded.

“Ow, ow, ow,” Morley moaned with each drop landing on him and he slithered into a nearby junkpile for temporary shelter. “Can you give me that green stuff too, two-leg?”

“It isn’t green stuff,” Asajj snapped in irritation.

“Well it was green and there’s proper shelter ahead, by the way.”

We looked around and it was still the same veritable maze of garbage.

I gave Asajj an intent look.

She rolled her eyes, “Fine, stick your head out so I can touch you.”

Morley carefully poked his snout out, which was enough as Asajj slapped him, extending the ichor protection to him.

“Ouch, oooh, that tickles.”

He carefully poked his head out and let out an awed hiss when he saw the acid rain magically bouncing away a few millimeters from his skin. He slithered out with a laugh of delight. “Ha, take that you stupid acid rain! Come now, to the right around this hill!”

We followed and sure enough a flat stable area opened up that seemed to have been formed from the constant passage of incinerator droids over time - creating a compacted surface. Then as their programming continued to churn and mutate over time, they moved onto other routes.

The shelter was made out of the ravaged structure of what had been an old light freighter, draped with layer upon layer of salvaged plastene materials that best resisted the acids falling from the sky.

Asajj looked at it skeptically, but her tracking rune lit up at its strongest level yet. 

“He could be in there, though it looks built by the junkers more than anything else,” she mused.

“Only one way to find out, better be ready in case he attacks though,” I warned.

Morley led the way and slithered through the draped entrance that had been made out of where the cockpit module had been.

Asajj entered first, just in case. Maul would clearly recognize a Nightsister, a female dathomirian and hesitate for that crucial moment.

The space inside was a mess.

Numerous dead junker bodies, their organic parts rotted away but on closer inspection I caught the glimpse of scratches on the metal parts, as if something with thin, pointy teeth had scraped each part for every possible morsel of meat away.

‘See it?’ I thought to Asajj.

‘Not surprising then that the junkers don’t like our guide. He eats them when he can and we’ve just walked into his lair.’

‘Yes, so do be careful of the trap two meters to your right, there’s a false floor there and only empty space beneath.’

We both continued our exploration of the space, not letting our guide know we had cottoned onto his plan. I had a memory of Morley from my past life, but even without that I would’ve sensed his emotions turn to an eager malevolence and hunger, whilst prescience would’ve caught the probability line where we step onto the false floor.

The anacondan was also now wrapped around a pole, his tail casually poised to drop on a hidden mechanism that was out of sight.

Asajj checked her tracking rune again. ‘He has to be below us, at least nine meters, maybe more.’

Morley was becoming steadily more frustrated as we casually avoided his little trap.

I sighed. The anacondan was doomed the moment we set foot on the planet. If I merely stunned him, Sidious’ assassin would casually dispose of him when she followed us down. If I grabbed him with the Force and threw him out of his lair, the assassin would just do the same thing, only sooner.

The assassin was trained to kill all potential witnesses.

“Morely,” I said casually.

“What?” his voice barely hiding his frustration.

My crimson blade had ignited and spun through the air rapidly in the blink of an eye, cleaving the anacondan into three smoking pieces.

Asajj raised an eyebrow at me, “Thanks for saving me the trouble.”

She gestured to the floor and the false durasteel panel was ripped off and tossed outside with a clatter of steel to hiss as the acid rain attacked it.

The tunnel it revealed was a straight fall downward for sixteen meters into near darkness. The only light below came from a small tongue of flame just out of sight.

Asajj didn’t hesitate and stepped forward to let gravity take over.

I followed a few seconds later, controlling my fall and bleeding off the kinetic energy into Force.

The darkness was banished properly when she lit one of her lightsabers, casting everything in a yellow sheen.

We were now in an adjoining tunnel that had been torn apart and compacted in a way that could only have been done by the Force. It was roughly three meters in height and stretched in both directions for thirteen meters before curving out of sight. The air was practically choked with the Dark Side and it was as if Maul had generated his own mini-nexus down here. Trying to sense him was utterly futile in these conditions.

Yet there was one sense I could fall back on… my montrals and echo sense.

Asajj abruptly turned around, holding her saber higher to cast its light further, but there was nothing.

‘Thought I heard something,’ she thought.

‘You did. He’s already seen us. The lightsaber made him back off. Come.’

We walked down the tunnel, essentially following the flow and direction of when Maul had literally first bored his way through. His sheer strength of will was utterly amazing to think about. I tried to imagine him, cut in half, holding in his own guts with the Force, forcing his skin to grow and close around the entire lower stump of his body. He would’ve eventually gotten some mobility by using his arms and levering himself forward on them, pushing his stump forward with the momentum, using the Force for everything else.

We passed the skeletal remains of a variety of species, both sentient and not. The majority was more junker cybernetic remains.

‘So this is how he sustains himself,’ Asajj mused. ‘Morley was actually serving him, luring food into the trap above. It’s no wonder the junkers attacked. They were trying to deny potential food to Maul.’

We came to a Y-intersection and paused.

The rune above Asajj’s palm pulsed stronger to the left.

We headed in that direction and I felt the sound of our footsteps bounce back to us from something large in the darkness beyond our light. I ignited both my red blades at this point, casting its blood red sheen across the tunnel. The large presence abruptly retreated with the tinny clatter of many legs.

‘Why did you do that?’

‘A yellow blade will signify the enemy to his instincts, red will at least make him pause.’

Asajj let her blade extinguish, seeing the logic and we advanced forward side by side, with my blades held defensively forward.

“ARRGH!”

Into the red light the emaciated figure of Darth Maul surged forward, hands held out like claws with cruel long nails, the horns on his head was a long jagged crown, grown vastly out of their usual proportion. The solid black tattoos on his red skin were stretched and askew as the skin beneath it suffered from malnutrition. Bloodshot eyes with Force corrupted yellow irises glowed with madness, fear, desperation as he sought to find a way past the deadly red weapons, to rip and tear at the succulent flesh beyond. We saw the crude, multi-limbed mechanical body strapped around what was left of Maul’s waist; it had clearly been a six legged droid at some point, now attached directly to his body through the same methods that the Junkers used.

The moment had happened so suddenly and when combined with the sheer miasma of Maul’s awful presence in the Force, which washed over us like a tsunami…

We couldn’t help it at all…  both Asajj and I flinched and faltered.

I barely managed to keep my blades in hand, surging my own will forward to tighten my grip and fight against the power that was calling at my every instinct to run and hide. The Dark Side had engulfed us and in a corner of my mind I realized we had experienced a variation of the Force Scream.

Only our inherent passive strength in the Force had let us stand our ground.

Asajj rallied her own strength and screamed in defiance as she shot out a Force Push that hit Maul directly in his center.

Maul and his prosthetic body was sent ass over a teakettle down the tunnel.

It took him but a single tumble to regain control and he skittered away in retreat, taking full advantage of both multi-limbed speed and an entirely subconscious use of the Force. I realized that the latter was the only reason that we were both still alive and had Maul retained just slightly more reason and strength, both Asajj and I would’ve died to a Force Scream that would’ve ripped the flesh from our bones.

I don’t know how I managed the will to chase after Maul, but a few seconds later both of us were using Force Speed and blurring in chase after our objective.

We emerged into a large volume of space that had been hollowed out of the compacted garbage. Large support trusses had been put in place in arcs, at regular intervals to support the roof, giving the impression we were inside the hollowed out carcass of some giant beast. Near the center, a fire was burning from a gap in the floor and provided the only flickering light in the space.

“I call you Brother of Dathomir!” Asajj shouted into the space as we both spotted Maul moving to the other side of the fire and another tunnel exit. Her words resounded in the Force, almost like Talzin’s and ichor flashed over her body.

Maul froze on the spot, his monstrous prosthetic body poised to run. He turned his head to regard Asajj with a brief moment of curiosity, before the madness took over again.

“NO! nO! Don’t! Haaaah!” His fingers clawed against his scalp.

“You are a Brother of Dathomir! Not some mad wild animal!”

“No! Noo! Raah! Noooo!”

“You are the son of Talzin. You are my kin! I am a Nightsister sent by your mother to find you!”

“NO!” Maul turned around, stared at both of us and began laughing madly. “Ha! Ha! Uh!” Which then devolved into a mad crying wail. “No… no… you don’t know. NO! You don’t know anything!” The anger and madness returned, fighting back to dispel the small hold that Asajj’s words had gained. “No… no… never!” He cackled madly again.

“I am of Dathomir. You are the blood of Dathomir. Taken from us by our enemy at a young age.”

“No! Never… never again! Go… go away!”

Yet despite having a clear exit, Maul’s spider body remained where it was and even walked closer, keeping the fire between us and him.

Asajj had her moment and her hands clapped together, a pulse of ichor shooting out and entirely engulfing Maul’s form and he slumped to the ground, robbed of all voluntary movement below the neck.

“NO! Leave me! There is nothing for you!” He screamed, some minor bits of the true Maul began leaking through.

She stepped forward around the fire and approached Maul’s biological upper body.

I started tapping my foot.

“Your mother disagrees, Maul. She can no longer sit idly whilst her own blood languishes in torment in this place.” Asajj tapped a finger on his forehead.

Maul, former Darth of the Sith Order, apprentice to the Dark Lord Sidious, closed his eyes and fell into the induced coma sleep of the Nightsisters. The inherent Dark Side miasma clouding everything fell away.

“Will you be able to work on him here?” I asked idly.

Asajj closed her eyes for a moment. “Mostly. Enough to get him back to the ship-”

I dodged my waist to the right and twisted, bringing around both my lightsabers into a blurring slash into the air behind me.

The freshly ignited red lightsaber that had been about to stab into my back was frantically brought up in defense and my blades crashed down on it with all the speed and strength I could muster.

I pushed forward on my opponent’s lightsaber and amazingly still didn’t see the person holding it.

The sound of the humming and clashing blades was bouncing off them well enough, forming a rough shape of them in my mind.

“Nice try. Drop the cloak, Inquisitor,” I grinned fiercely at the empty space behind the blade lock.

The Force moved, twisted and phased in a way that made me want to kick myself as I saw the technique that had eluded me for years being applied right in front of me.

Then I saw the true face of my opponent and blinked in astonishment.

The Force Wave exploded from me in anger a moment later.

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A/N: This was a nasty place to flesh out further. Ew, ew, just thinking about planetary sized landfill and the true hazards such a place would have. So who or what could our Inquisitor be? ;-) Enjoy your weekend and stay awesome!