Chapter 18

Chapter 18

IT WAS FIVE DAYS before Ahsoka managed to get Hedala alone. She spent that time working on one of the bigger Fardi transports, tuning the engine and installing a new compressor. She didn’t ask what the cargo would be. The Fardis were welcoming because she was useful, but they weren’t about to tell her the secrets of their operation. Frankly, Ahsoka wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

In the end, Hedala sought her out, padding into Ahsoka’s tiny room in the family compound after she was supposed to be in bed. Ahsoka had wanted to turn down the offer to stay in the family house but couldn’t think of a way to do it politely. Her old house had been taken over by someone else, and she couldn’t sleep on the ship. It wasn’t like she had a lot of options. The house was loud and noisy, but at least she could keep an eye on things.

“Sit, little one.” She said it the way she might have spoken to a Jedi youngling.

Hedala sat down on Ahsoka’s bed platform. She crossed her bare feet and put her hands on her knees. It was Ahsoka’s favored position for meditation, and she mirrored the little girl without thinking about it.

“Hedala, I need you to tell me about the shadow,” Ahsoka said. “Anything you can remember about it. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” Hedala said. “I never saw it, but I knew that it was here, in the city.”

“How did you know?” Ahsoka asked. “I mean, how did you know if you couldn’t see it?”

“I could feel it,” Hedala said. “Like I feel the sun when it’s too hot, only dark, not light.”

“And then one day it was just gone?” Ahsoka asked.

“Yes.” The little girl tapped her fingers on her knees.

Ahsoka considered how best to proceed. She didn’t want to terrify the child completely, but she did want her to be cautious. She wished she’d spent more time with younglings. Master Yoda always seemed good at talking to them. She tried to imagine what he would say and then found herself fighting off unexpected giggles when she remembered Master Yoda’s unique way of talking. Maybe that was why the younglings had liked him so much.

“You were very smart to stay out of the shadow’s way,” Ahsoka told her. “It’s always wiser to wait and learn when something is unfamiliar and scary.”

“I didn’t tell anyone,” Hedala said. “Do you think that was foolish? I didn’t think they would believe me.”

“But you knew I would?” Ahsoka asked.

“Chenna says that well-traveled people always believe more things,” Hedala said matter-of-factly. “They have seen more, so they have bigger imaginations.”

“Chenna might be right,” Ahsoka said. “I think you were right to keep the shadow to yourself. It’s easier to hide from something like that if no one else is looking for it.”

“I’m very good at hiding,” Hedala said.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Ahsoka told her. “But I think you should get to bed before someone comes looking for you, just to save your reputation.”

Hedala giggled and went on her way, leaving Ahsoka with her thoughts.

The shadow was almost certainly one of the dark side’s creatures. Ahsoka had no idea what sort of thing it might be, but whatever it was couldn’t be that powerful, because it hadn’t been able to track down Hedala. That ruled out Palpatine himself, not that the Emperor could just show up on a planet without causing a great deal of alarm. It also ruled out whatever Palpatine was using to track down surviving Jedi. Ahsoka had heard rumors of a dark lord who served the Emperor, but nothing confirmable. As usual, she felt rather cut off without her former channels of intelligence. At least Hedala said the shadow was gone.

Ahsoka spared a momentary thought to wonder where it went. She tallied the days on her fingers, accounting for time spent in hyperspace, which always made things a bit fuzzy, and realized that Hedala’s shadow had left shortly after Ahsoka had rescued Kaeden on Raada. It was probably a coincidence, but at the same time, Ahsoka had been around long enough to know that coincidences and the Force rarely went together. There was always some sort of link.

She drummed her fingers on her knees, the way Hedala had earlier, and wondered what the shadow would do to Raada once it learned Ahsoka was gone. It hadn’t done anything to the Fardis, but they weren’t already the targets of an Imperial investigation. Perhaps she should try to draw the shadow back.

Except, of course, that would put Hedala in danger again and Ahsoka, as well. Ahsoka resisted the urge to smack her head against the wall. It was difficult to keep one’s own counsel. She missed being able to ask for advice. Imagining what her masters would do was only so useful, and she always felt foolish when she talked to herself. When she meditated and thought about the quandary, the voice that came to her with a suggestion was, somewhat surprisingly, Padmé Amidala’s. Ever the politician, the Naboo senator prized gathering information and playing to her strengths.

At this particular moment, Ahsoka’s strengths were all inside the Fardi compound. She was as protected as she could be, she had access to the Holonet for news, and if she invested a little more time in making the older members of the family trust her, they would probably be able to give her a very good idea of what was going on, even if she had to construct it backward from shady trade deals. It wasn’t the way Ahsoka was used to thinking about politics, but with any luck, it wasn’t the way her unknown opponents were expecting her to act, either.

Ahsoka lay down, putting her head on the pillow and thinking, as she always did, how much softer it was than anything she’d slept on when she was a Padawan. If she was going to learn about intergalactic trade in the morning, she might as well be rested.

* * *

Fardi had been surprised when, only a week into her stay, Ahsoka had come to him with a request for a new job. He’d insisted on watching her piloting skills firsthand, which made sense given the stakes of the family business. Ahsoka knew she had impressed him, both in the atmosphere around Thabeska and on a circuit of the system at large.

“It’s not as if you can’t do both jobs,” Fardi said as Ahsoka landed the freighter, their last test run completed. “We’ll let you know when we have need of a pilot. Nothing else will change.”

That suited Ahsoka just fine.

They started her off with small jobs. She flew to other cities on Thabeska, controlled by other branches of the family, and made deliveries. Sometimes she flew her own ship, and sometimes she was assigned a larger one. She never asked what was in the crates, so if her cargo didn’t match the manifest, she didn’t know about it. After her tenth trip, she was starting to think that the Fardis smuggled just to stay in practice, except that every time she dropped something off, in some dark alley or behind an isolated warehouse, the people receiving it were emaciated, desperate, and grateful . It was oddly fulfilling work.

She learned that the main weapon of the Empire, after fear, was hunger. She had seen this strategy at work on Raada and also during the Clone Wars, but to see it applied on such a large scale made her very uncomfortable. The Empire was still new, still establishing itself in the outer reaches of the galaxy, and yet it was already incredibly powerful. And she realized that she had helped build it. The mechanisms put in place during the Clone Wars had been twisted for the Empire’s use, and every day the Emperor’s hold grew tighter. She almost admired Palpatine for his ability to pull off a long-term plan—except for his being evil and all.

By the time the Fardis trusted her with off-world transport missions, Ahsoka was more convinced than ever that the Empire must be resisted. Unfortunately, she still had no idea how. She understood, finally, how the farmers on Raada had felt as they were forced to poison their own fields. She felt their frustration and their anger and saw how it had pushed them to recklessness. She was going to owe Neera an apology when she returned, assuming Neera would even listen to her.

In the meantime, her only option was this passive resistance, and Ahsoka was grateful for it while she sought out other options, even though it wasn’t much of a distraction.

All that changed very quickly when Ahsoka picked up a distress call in the middle of one of her routine off-planet runs. It was coming from an escape pod, and Ahsoka hesitated only briefly to consider her options. The transport she was flying had a big enough cargo bay for a pod, and the pod wasn’t very far away. Quickly, she set course, and before long she had three shocked, though relieved, humans standing in front of her. From their expressions and general alarm, she didn’t think it had been a mechanical error that lost them their ship.

“It was pirates,” said the woman. She was the first to calm down enough to talk. “They attacked the shuttle we were on and took several prisoners. We barely made it into the pod.”

“Why would they attack you?” Ahsoka asked her, speaking as gently as she could.

“Ransom, I suspect,” the woman said. She shifted uncomfortably. Ransom was something that the Black Sun crime syndicate peddled in this sector, and they were not known for being courteous to their hostages.

“You don’t have to tell me your business,” Ahsoka told her. “Just tell me why you were targeted.”

“We were underbid by a well-known firm for a large project,” the taller of the two men said, after considering his words for a moment. The only large projects were Imperial ones. “We were reworking the numbers to see if we could match the lower bid when we were attacked.”

“You think your competitors would like to bankrupt you enough that you can’t afford a lower bid?” Ahsoka asked.

The woman nodded.

“If I help you and you save the credits, are you still going to get involved?” she demanded. She was willing to help people who needed it, but she was far less comfortable making it easier for them to serve the Empire. The fact that she was forced to make that sort of distinction made her feel ill.

“No,” the woman said emphatically. “No credits are worth this kind of trouble. We just want our people back and we’re out.”

The way she said people made Ahsoka think she wasn’t just talking about employees.

“All right,” said Ahsoka. “Give me the coordinates.”

After that, it seemed like she kept running into people who needed help. The missions—if she could call them that—were random and unorganized, and sometimes they ended badly. More than once, she was betrayed and escaped only because she’d been trained to fly by the best pilot in the galaxy. But little by little, she carved out a reputation. Or Ashla did. After the first time, she did what she could to prevent those she was helping from seeing her face. They usually understood. Anonymity was the best defense she could muster.

If the Fardis knew what she was up to when she took their ships and cargo off-planet, they didn’t complain. She made sure the ships she flew were hard to track, and she scrubbed off all evidence of carbon scoring every time she was back on the ground. Soon, she thought, she would be ready to go back to Raada. Soon she’d find a ship big enough for her friends. And the rest of the farmers, too. It wasn’t a big town. She would think of something.

If she was being honest, being a hero again felt good. She had been trained for this, for justice, and the fact that she was working against those who had hurt her so badly only made it better. She was careful and did her best to resist her reckless nature. And she made life a little easier for the people of the Outer Rim.

Her good work did not go unnoticed.

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