Star Wars: Ahsoka

by Johnston, E. K.

  As motivational speeches went, it was not her best, but it did spur her into action. She risked a jump from the rooftop to the alley below, prioritizing speed over anything else. She pulled the blaster out of her bag. Quickly, she unseated the overload dowels in the ammo pack and set the blaster on the ground. Now she had to move. She ran down the alley and leapt over a short wall into a family garden. A few steps and another jump took her to a different alley, and she raced toward the shipyard.

  She reached the open area just as the blaster exploded. The stormtroopers reacted immediately, falling into neat lines and running toward the noise with admirable dedication. They didn’t completely desert the yard, but it was good enough for Ahsoka’s purposes.

  Ahsoka stuck to corners where she could hide and behind crates to block the remaining Imperials’ sight lines. She reached the ramp of the Fardi ship and was aboard before anyone was the wiser.

  “I hope I’m not stealing anything you need,” she said to her absent benefactors. “But thanks for the ship.”

  The engine hummed to life just as the other stormtroopers returned to the yard, but by then it was too late. Ahsoka was in the air before they could set up the heavy weaponry and out of range before they could fire. She was away, on the run again, and she had no idea where in the galaxy she was going to go next.

  FROM ORBIT, Raada didn’t look like much. The readout from the navicomputer wasn’t particularly enthralling, either, but that was part of Ahsoka’s reason for choosing the moon. It was small, and out of the way even by Outer Rim standards, with only one resource. Ahsoka could be unremarkable here. She didn’t like to make the same mistake twice, and she had made a big one on Thabeska, getting involved with one of the planet’s most prominent families.

  Ahsoka set the ship down in what could barely be called a spaceport and secured it against theft as best she could. While in transit, Ahsoka had made some modifications to the vessel, hoping to conceal where she’d gotten it from, and discovered that a fairly sophisticated ground-lock system was already in place. Recoding it had been relatively straightforward, even without an astromech droid like R2-D2 to help. She did one final check, her eyes drawn to a pair of metal rings that demarcated a pressure valve on the power console. The rings had no purpose beyond making the panel look clean and tidy. Ahsoka pried them loose and pocketed them without much more thought. That done, she shouldered her bag and walked down the ramp.

  On the ground, Raada had a distinctive, though not altogether unpleasant, odor. There was life on the moon’s surface that the computer didn’t account for: green and growing. Ahsoka could sense it without effort and drew in a deep breath. After a year of either space or Thabeska’s dust, it was a welcome change. Perhaps when Ahsoka meditated here, she would find something between her and the yawning gulf that had haunted her since Order 66.

  A few people were in the spaceport, loading crates onto a large freighter, but they ignored Ahsoka as she made her way past them. If there was someone she was supposed to pay for a berth, Ahsoka didn’t find them, so she decided to worry about that later. A place like Raada had even less of a legitimate government than Thabeska or a Hutt-controlled world, but Ahsoka could handle any local toughs who thought she might be easy pickings. What she needed now was a place to stay, and she knew where she wanted to start looking.

  Raada had only the one major settlement, and Ahsoka would not go so far as to call it a city. By Coruscant standards, the settlement barely existed at all, and even the Fardis would have turned their noses up at it. There were no tall houses, no rooftop highways, and only one market near the dilapidated administration buildings in the center of town. Ahsoka headed straight for the outskirts, where she hoped there would be an abandoned house she could borrow. If not, she’d have to start looking outside of the town.

  As she walked, Ahsoka took note of her new surroundings. Though the architecture was monotonous and mostly prefabricated, there was enough decorative embellishment that she knew the people who lived in the houses cared about them. They weren’t transient workers: they were on Raada to stay. Moreover, judging by the variation in style, Ahsoka could tell that the people who lived on Raada had come from all over the Outer Rim. That made the moon an even better place for her to hide, because her Togruta features would be unremarkable.

  After a few blocks, Ahsoka found herself in a neighborhood with smaller houses that had been cobbled together with no sense of aesthetic. This suited her, and she set to looking for one that was uninhabited. The first one she found had no roof. The second was right next to a cantina—quiet enough in the middle of the day but presumably loud and obnoxious at night. The third, a couple of streets over from the cantina and right on the edge of the town, looked promising. Ahsoka stood in front of it, weighing her options.

  “There’s no one in it,” said someone behind her. Ahsoka’s hands tightened on lightsaber hilts that were no longer there as she turned.

  It was a girl about Ahsoka’s age, but with more lines around her eyes. Ahsoka had spent her life on starships or in the Jedi Temple, for the most part. This girl looked like she worked outside all the time and had weathered skin to show for it. Her eyes were sharp but not vicious. She was lighter than Master Windu but darker than Rex, and she had more hair than both of them combined—not that that was difficult—braided into brown lines neatly out of her way and secured behind her head.

  “Why is it abandoned?” Ahsoka asked.

  “Cietra got married, moved out,” was the reply. “There’s nothing wrong with it, if you’re looking for a place.”

  “Do I have to buy it?” Ahsoka asked. She had some credits but preferred to save them as long as she possibly could.

  “Cietra didn’t,” said the girl. “I don’t see why you should.”

  “Well, then I suppose it suits me,” Ahsoka said. She paused, not entirely sure what came next. She didn’t want to volunteer a lot of personal information, but she had a decent story prepared if anyone asked.

  “I’m Kaeden,” said the girl. “Kaeden Larte. Are you here for the harvest? That’s why most people come here, but we’re almost done. I’d be out there myself, except I lost an argument with one of the threshers yesterday.”

  “No,” said Ahsoka. “I’m not much of a farmer. I’m just looking for a quiet place to set up shop.”

  Kaeden shot her a piercing look, and Ahsoka realized she was going to have to be more clear or she’d stick out in spite of herself. She sighed.

  “I repair droids and other mechanicals,” she said. She wasn’t as good as Anakin had been, but she was good enough. Away from the Temple and the war, Ahsoka had discovered that the galaxy was full of people who were merely good at things, not prodigious. It was taking her a while to readjust her way of thinking.

  “We can always use that,” Kaeden said. “Is that all your stuff?”

  “Yes,” Ahsoka said shortly, hoping to discourage further questions. It worked, because Kaeden took half a step back and looked embarrassed.

  “I’ll let a few people know you’re setting up when they get in from the fields tonight,” she said, before the pause grew uncomfortably long. “They’ll be along tomorrow with work for you. In a few days, it’ll be like you’ve never lived anywhere else.”

  “I doubt that,” Ahsoka said, too low for Kaeden to hear. She cleared her throat and spoke louder. “That will be fine.”

  “Welcome to Raada.” Kaeden’s tone was sardonic, a forced smile on her face, but Ahsoka smiled back anyway.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Kaeden walked back up the street, favoring her left leg as she went. The limp was not pronounced, but Ahsoka could tell that the injury was painful. That meant medical treatment on Raada was either expensive or unavailable. She shook her head and ducked through the door of her new house.

  Cietra, whoever she was, was clearly no housekeeper. Ahsoka had expected some mustiness, given the abandoned state of the house, but what she found was actual dirt. The floors and the single tab
le were coated with it, and she was a little worried what she might find on the bed. Ahsoka ran a finger across the tabletop and discovered that the dirt was mixed with some kind of engine grease, which made it sticky.

  “The things Jedi training doesn’t prepare you for,” she mused, and then bit her tongue. Even alone, she shouldn’t say that word. It felt like betrayal, to deny where she’d come from, but it wasn’t safe and she couldn’t afford to slip up in public.

  Ahsoka found a cupboard that had cleaning supplies in it and set to work. It was an easy job, if tedious, and strangely satisfying to see the dirt disappear. The cleaner wasn’t a droid, but it was efficient. As it hummed around the room, Ahsoka was able to find the best place in the house to hide her things.

  The panel under the crude shower came off and revealed a compartment just large enough for her stash of credits. Everything else went under the bed, once Ahsoka finished disinfecting it. Then she sat cross-legged on the mattress and listened to the cleaner circumnavigate the room. Its hum reminded her of the training spheres she’d used as a youngling. She closed her eyes and felt her body ready itself for the energy bolt, though she was pretty sure the cleaner wasn’t going to shoot her.

  From there, it was easy to fall into her meditation. For a moment she hesitated, afraid of what she’d seen—not seen—since the Jedi purge, but then she let herself go. Meditation was one of the things she missed most, and one of the few things that wasn’t likely to get her caught, even if someone saw her doing it.

  The Force felt different now, and Ahsoka wasn’t sure how much of the difference was her. By walking away from the Temple, from the Jedi, she had given up her right to the Force—or at least that’s what she told herself sometimes. She knew it was a lie. The Force was always going to be a part of her, whether she was trained or not, the way it was part of everything. She couldn’t remove the parts of her that were sensitive to it any more than she could breathe on the wrong side of an airlock. Her authority was gone; her power remained.

  But there was a darkness to her meditations now that she didn’t like. It was as if a shroud had been wrapped around her perceptions, dulling her vision. She knew there was something there, but it was hard to make out, and she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to. The familiar presence of Anakin was gone, like a disrupted conduit that no longer channeled power the way it was meant to. Ahsoka couldn’t feel him anymore, or any of the others. Even the sense of the Jedi as a whole was gone, and she’d been able to feel that since she was too small to articulate what it was that she felt. The feeling had saved her life once, when she was very young and a false Jedi came to Shili to enslave her. She missed it like she would have missed a limb.

  The cleaner ran into the bed platform twice, stubbornly refusing to alter its course. Ahsoka leaned down and turned it in the other direction. She watched it for a few moments before she retreated back into her meditation, this time not quite so far. She wanted to get a sense of Raada, something more than her initial response could tell her, and this was as good a time as any to do it.

  The moon stretched out around her. She was facing the center of town, so she reached behind where she sat. There were the fields, mostly harvested as Kaeden had said and ready for the next season’s planting. There was stone, rocky hills and caves where nothing useful could grow. There were large animals, though whether they were for labor or food, Ahsoka couldn’t tell. And there were boots, dozens of them, walking toward her.

  Ahsoka shook herself out of her trance and found that the cleaner was cheerfully butting itself against the door to the shower. She got up to turn it off, and the new sound reached her ears: talking, laughing, and stamping feet. Her new neighbors were home from their day’s work in the fields.

  KAEDEN SHOWED UP on Ahsoka’s doorstep bright and early the following morning with two ration packs and a—

  “What is that?” Ahsoka asked, staring at the mangled bits of scrap Kaeden held under her arm.

  “Your first patient, if you’re interested,” Kaeden replied cheerfully.

  “I can’t fix it if I don’t know what it was supposed to do in the first place,” Ahsoka protested, but held out her hands anyway.

  Kaeden took this as an invitation to enter. She deposited the broken pieces into Ahsoka’s hands and then sat on the bed, putting the rations down beside her.

  “It’s the thresher I lost a fight with,” Kaeden said. If she felt strange about sitting on the place where Ahsoka slept, she gave no sign. Then again, the bed was Ahsoka’s only furniture, besides the low table.

  Ahsoka spread the pieces on the table and sat down on the floor to look at them more closely. She supposed that the contraption might have been a thresher. But it could have also been a protocol droid, for all the mess it was in.

  “I’d hate to see what happens when you win fights,” Ahsoka said.

  “It was not my fault.” Kaeden said it with the air of a person who has made the argument, unsuccessfully, several times before. “One moment we were cruising along, set to make quota and everything, and the next thing I knew, disaster.”

  “How’s the leg?” Ahsoka asked. Her fingers moved across the table, rearranging parts and trying to figure out if anything was salvageable.

  “It’ll be well enough to go back to work tomorrow,” Kaeden said. “I’ll keep my harvest bonus, particularly if I don’t have to pay to replace the thresher.”

  Ahsoka gave her a long look.

  “I’ll pay you instead, I mean,” Kaeden said quickly. “Starting with breakfast. Dig in.”

  She tossed Ahsoka a ration pack. Ahsoka didn’t recognize the label, except that it wasn’t Imperial or Republic.

  “No place like home,” Kaeden said, ripping her own pack open. “There’s not much point in living on a farm planet if you have to import food. These just make it easier to keep track of who gets what.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Ahsoka said. She tore the packaging open and took a sniff. She had definitely eaten worse.

  “Anyway, can you fix my thresher?” Kaeden asked.

  “Why don’t you tell me what went wrong with it, and I’ll see what I can do,” Ahsoka said.

  She turned back to the table and continued to move the parts around while Kaeden told her about the mishap. Ahsoka was used to the way clones told war stories, but Kaeden could have given them a run for their credits. To hear her tell it, the thresher had suddenly developed sentience and objected to its lot as a farming implement, and only Kaeden’s quick thinking—and heavy boots—had prevented it from taking over the galaxy.

  “And when it finally stopped moving,” Kaeden said, winding up, “my sister pointed out that I was bleeding. I said it was only fair, since the thresher was bleeding oil, but then I passed out a little bit, so I guess it was worse than I thought. I woke up in medical with this fancy bandage and the stupid machine in a tray beside my cot.”

  Ahsoka laughed, surprising herself, and held up a bent piece of what had once been the thresher’s coolant system.

  “Here’s the problem,” she said. “Well, I mean, part of your problem. If you can replace this, I can rebuild the thresher.”

  “Replace it?” Kaeden’s smile died. “Do you think you can just, I don’t know, unbend it somehow?”

  Ahsoka looked down. This wasn’t like the Temple, or even her field experience commanding troops. There were no supply lines and no backup, not without cost. Replacement was a last resort.

  “I can give it a shot,” she said. “Now tell me more about how things work around here.”

  The previous night, Kaeden had not been overly curious about Ahsoka’s reasons for coming to Raada. As the girl chattered on about work rotations and crop cycles, it occurred to Ahsoka that having reasons might not be important. As Kaeden described it, Raada was a good place to lead an unmomentous life: hard work, ample food, and just enough official enforcement that local freelancing was discouraged. No one asked too many questions, and as long as you met your work quotas, your presenc
e was unremarkable. Ahsoka Tano wouldn’t do very well here, but Ashla would do just fine.

  Ahsoka looked for something heavy she could use to hit the metal. If she was going to fix things professionally, she was going to have to invest in some tools. She mentally counted her credits and tried to figure out how many of them she could spare against an unknown future. She would have to make an investment at some point, and tools would help sell her cover story.

  She ended up using the heel of her boot and hitting the piece against the floor to avoid breaking the table. It wasn’t top quality when she was finished, but the part would no longer let coolant leak out. She set to reassembling the thresher around it.

  “I’ve left my ship at the spaceport,” Ahsoka said. “Do I have to register it with anyone?”

  “No,” Kaeden said. “Just make sure you lock it up tight. There are more than a few opportunists around here.”

  She meant thieves, Ahsoka understood. Nowhere was perfect. “That’s why I left most of my gear on board,” she lied. “It’s more secure than this house is.”

  “We can help you with that,” Kaeden said. “My sister and I, I mean. She’s good at making locks, and I’m good at convincing people to leave you alone.”

  “When you’re not losing fights with machinery, I assume?” Ahsoka said.

  “Most people lose arms and legs when things go badly,” Kaeden said in her own defense. “I’m too good for that.”

  Kaeden rolled off the bed and walked over to take a look at what Ahsoka was doing. She hummed approvingly and then pointed to the random pieces still on the table.

  “What are those for?” she asked.

  “I have no idea,” Ahsoka replied. “But they didn’t seem to have a place in the machine, so I left them aside. I think it should work, once you refill the coolant and refuel the lines.”

  “I can do that when I reattach the blade,” Kaeden said.