A Young Girl’s War Between the Stars
03
Zeltros, 43 BBY.
I can’t believe I am actively falling for ‘There’s candy back in my space ship, little girl.’
It wasn’t that simple, of course.
The old man in this scenario was a Jedi master and member of their council, and a diplomat here on official business. The Jedi had a reputation for being exactly the sort of Lawful Good that an offer like the one I’d been given was no doubt genuine.
The candy in question was only the thing I was most concerned with: my future. Namely, the possibility of a stable future and a ticket off of Zeltros now. Then there was the unspoken understanding that I would be trained to use the Force by a group who had been refining the process for thousands of years. I felt I had done alright on my own, but seeing the master Jedi use telekinesis so casually, I couldn’t help but suspect I was doing something wrong—lacking some understanding of it that they had and I didn’t in my fumbling around and experimenting with converting what I knew to this new system.
In the end, I made what was either going to be the dumbest or smartest decision of this lifetime. I chose to get in the metaphorical van.
“Tanya? You’re back late. What are you doing?” the matron asked as I packed.
“Packing. I’m late because I met Jedi Master Dooku on my walk and he offered me a position with the Jedi. I spent the afternoon sitting quietly and listening in while he conducted negotiations,” I answered, throwing the last of my important clothes into the bag. I’d asked what I should pack and the answer came down to not much. I was mostly just packing my underthings and tablet, because even clothes would be provided for me—but it would help if I had some of my own going in. I kept a couple of changes of my normal clothes just in case. They would provide me with a tablet there, but I didn’t want to lose the notes I had accumulated, so I’d be taking it with me.
The Jedi lived a very ascetic lifestyle when it came to possessions—especially the so-called younglings. The children in training. That wasn’t to say one couldn’t have personal belongings or even wealth, and not all Jedi kept strictly to that tradition. In fact, acquiring wealth for the purpose of advancing the Jedi’s goals and one’s own missions as a Jedi was encouraged.
Frowning, the Matron crossed her arms. “We’ll see about that. Where is this supposed Jedi?”
“He told me to meet him at his ship,” I shrugged, slinging my bag over my shoulder.
“I’ll come with you.”
Nodding, I made for the door. The Matron paused only to let one of her helpers among the older children know she would be gone an hour or so and to start preparing the evening meal. Then, we were outside and making our way to the public transit. A ride to the correct spaceport later, I followed the signs towards the berth Master Dooku had told me to find.
The ship currently docked in the berth was about what I had come to expect from most Republic designs: angular, blocky, and ugly, valuing function entirely over form. It was small enough to be crewed by one, perhaps with a small complement of droids, but looked large enough to have its own living quarters.
One about that size would be nice to have. Travel where I like, no sleeping in the pilot’s chair, a kitchen, restroom and shower.
“There you are,” the Jedi master walked down the ramp leading into the ship. Spotting the Matron, he smiled and asked, “Who’s this?”
“The Matron of the orphanage,” I answered as he waved me past him, starting up the ramp. Turning, I gave the woman a polite bow. “Thank you for taking care of me these past years. I know it hasn’t been easy.”
The woman sighed, before nodding. “You don’t have to leave, you know.”
“I know. But I think it’s better for everyone that I do.”
“I’ll be just a moment, padawan. Follow the hall to your left when you enter and you’ll find a set of unused guest quarters on your right. They are yours for the duration of our journey,” Dooku instructed and I nodded, letting him have a moment in private with the Matron.
I found the room right where he said it would be and put my things down. The room was small, but livable—with a nicely sized bed that folded into the wall to save space, a toilet/sink combo that did likewise, and a small desk/table that also folded in with a chair magnetized to the floor. A rug covered most of the floor space and, given the way everything could just be folded up into the walls or moved into a corner, I had a feeling that was an intentional design choice and the quarters likely doubled as a training room. Possibly meditation as well, given the transparent metal window that one wall was that could be ‘closed,’ or rather become opaque with the touch of a button.
There was a knock at the door as I finished up inspecting everything and I turned to find the Jedi standing there with a smile on his face. “Are you ready for your first lesson, padawan?”
“Sure,” I nodded, turning and giving him my attention, waiting for instruction. Instead, he motioned for me to follow.
“While I am not a stickler for protocol, many of my colleagues are. The proper term for addressing one’s teacher is master, while the apprentice is either that or padawan. If they have a rank, such as knight or consular, use that. When addressing the Jedi Council, either councilor or master are appropriate.”
“Thank you, sir,” I nodded and he smiled as we passed through a door into a cockpit.
“Take a seat and strap in,” Dooku instructed, gesturing to the seat beside him. I did as I was instructed and he gestured at the controls. “What do you see?”
“Flight controls,” I answered immediately. “I don’t know the specifics, beyond that this is the control yoke and this is a throttle.”
The old man nodded and leaned back in his chair, his brown eyes watching me like a hawk. “Close your eyes, then open your mind. Listen to the Force. Feel it within and around you. Reach out with it. Don’t try to wrest it under your control, instead let it guide you. As you do, focus on the desire to power the ship up for takeoff.”
Considering him for a moment as he watched, I eventually nodded and closed my eyes. I lowered my mental shields for a moment and winced at the volume—the spaceport was even rowdier than the city, because here it was a concentration of alien species all with conflicting emotions, desires, and thoughts. At least among the other Zeltrons, the usual prevailing thought/emotion was happy with a side of horny. I could tune that out even without the shields.
Dooku chuckled and I cracked an eye open. “That’s my mistake. You don’t need to open yourself up with that sense,” he explained, and I immediately raised my mental shields again. “Feel the Force within yourself and open yourself to the feeling of it around you.”
Oh, I realized what he was actually talking about. It was effectively the same thing as sensing mana in the environment, except with this new power. The so-called ‘Force.’ I’d been practicing that for years already—since I was born, in fact. I’d never felt it guiding me, however.
I reached out with my senses and felt out the cockpit, following his instructions on trying to focus on starting the ship at the same time. I felt the controls around and in front of me. Something stood out from everything else. I wouldn’t call it any kind of guiding force. Not really. It felt like an… echo? Kind of like fingerprints or wear marks showing which keys on a keypad or keyboard had been used most often.
Undoing the harness on my seat, I reached out and flipped a switch on my left, pressed a series of buttons on my right, then hit another button on the left. The ship hummed to life around us. Feeling what came next, I hit another button and felt the ship shudder as the ramp retracted and the hatch closed. Opening my eyes, I looked over the readouts and saw that they all sort of felt right.
“This is such a cheat skill,” I muttered, shaking my head, to a chuckle from the old Jedi.
“How do you feel about taking us out of the dock and into space?”
I looked over the controls and found a simple visual display for communications with the spaceport. Tapping the buttons, I cycled through options before I found what I was looking for—clearance to take off. A moment later, we were approved and given a vector and speed. After that, everything was just… moving and pressing things in the right sequence and following those impressions. Soon enough, we were in the black, the planet glowing blue below us and other ships and the space stations and satellites showing up on sensor readouts.
For a moment, I sat there and stared out the window into space. Sure, having any kind of windows on a space ship instead of view screens seemed like a horrible design flaw, but at the moment, I was willing to let it go just for the view. Nothing but the black of space, the glow of the moon and the planet below, the twinkling of stars and things in orbit.
Carefully, I eased my mental walls down. I nearly breathed a sigh of relief when all I could feel was the void that was Dooku and the faint collective feeling that was Zeltros from below—no individual mental presence discernible, just a mess of excitement, happiness, sexual arousal, sexual gratification, and the usual ‘emotional party soup’ I was accustomed to.
“It’s quiet,” I smiled, and the old man nodded.
“Space tends to be, yes. Planets with large populations can be a bit overwhelming for a Jedi’s senses, and I imagine that will be doubly so with you. But it seems you’re well on your way to learning how to deal with it. Which is good, because our destination is the most populated planet in the core. If you would, please lay in a course for Coruscant and make the jump to hyperspace.”
Now, how do I…? I wondered, before the right panel stood out. A bit of tapping brought up a list of common destinations, with Coruscant right at the top. From there, the computer did the hard work and all I had to do was engage the auto-pilot, letting the ship adjust its course automatically before making the jump itself. A timer began counting down and I idly checked the map.
Zeltros was in the galactic east/northeast of the Inner Rim, right on the Trellen Trade Route. It would be roughly twelve hours along that hyperspace lane, then the ship would drop out of hyperspace, change course, and get on the Hydian Way. From there, it was thirty-six hours to the next interchange, where we would then move to the Perlemian Trade Route. It would be another thirteen hours to Coruscant from there. All told, two and a half days worth of travel—on a twenty-four hour time scale. Which oddly enough, most of this universe used because that was the length of a day in Coruscant, and Coruscant was kind of the standard due to being the economic center of the universe in many ways.
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I pushed those idle thoughts aside and instead turned towards my senses. As beautiful as the light show through the transparent metal hull was, I wanted to experience it with my more esoteric senses.
To my empathic sense, it felt strangely like stepping into… a dark forest. It was silent save for very distant echoes that might have been something, and a sort of lingering feeling that made my skin crawl and triggered who knows how many years of human, and then Zeltron evolution. I shut myself off, metaphorically crouching and hiding in a bush and trying to pretend I wasn’t there, because instinct told me something might be even if my logical brain couldn’t see or sense anything.
To my mana, or rather Force senses, it felt like we were flying through a river of the stuff. As though it were concentrated here—like veins pumping the energy through the body of the universe. I felt strangely… more sensitive. As with the empathic sense, there were sort of lingering echoes of ages gone by, but nothing distinct enough to make out.
The old Jedi sat observing me in silence for a few moments before nodding. “Yes, it’s best not to leave oneself exposed in hyperspace. You have good instincts. There are, of course, tales of entities that live within the hyperspace lanes themselves, especially the further one gets from the core. As with all tales told by spacefarers, there is perhaps some grain of truth to them. Even the most powerful Jedi tread carefully here and dare not open themselves up too much. After all, there are remnants of things in the universe, dark things, that are naturally drawn to the light and will strike at any vulnerable mind if the opportunity arises. Guard yourself well here, padawan.”
“Dark things such as…?” I prompted and the old man smiled.
“Have you heard of the Sith?” he asked, and I shook my head. “We’ve done much to erase them from history, through the years. You could consider them something of a dark counterpart to the Jedi order. Where Jedi seek peace, Sith sought war. Where Jedi strive for harmony, Sith caused chaos. Jedi fight to preserve life, Sith left nothing but death in their wake. Powerful force users sometimes leave some of themselves behind when they die. Lingering echoes. Ghosts in the Force, one could say. A Sith ghost is perhaps even more dangerous than a living one. They can use most of the powers they used in life and can even slip inside and attempt to steal a young, vulnerable Force user’s body. And that is just one of the many provable things we have evidence of, lurking in the dark.”
“I’ll be careful,” I agreed, firming up my mental walls and pulling my sense of the Force in, attempting to make my presence smaller.
Nodding, Dooku gestured at the controls. “What did you think?”
I considered it for a moment before frowning. “It was too easy. I understand perhaps a quarter of what I was doing.”
“Oh?” he asked, prompting me to continue.
“I don’t like it. I don’t like the idea of,” I cut myself off, but the thought resonated. I don’t like the idea of being a puppet to some Force, some universal will I don’t understand. It’s not to the level of Being X and the compulsion orb, obviously. I reached for it. I sought help and the Force provided. But…
“I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my own actions, or that I’m acting out actions I don’t understand just because something says I should.”
The old man nodded slowly. “You seek control. Over yourself, your mind, and your own actions.”
“Well, yes,” I agreed. “Mastery of oneself is important and a goal everyone should strive for. Also, the sanctity of one’s own mind should be inviolate. That it isn’t is worrying. The idea of giving up that control to some universal force for unknown and unknowable goals is…” I shook my head.
Master Dooku nodded. “I agree. That is what we teach at the Jedi temple. Self-control and mastery of the self, in body, mind, and spirit. Through that mastery comes the ability to secure oneself against malicious forces.” Seeing I was nodding along, he addressed my last point. “As for the Force… you are not giving yourself over to it to allow it to manipulate your actions, nor should you. Not unless you are prepared to accept everything that comes with that life. It is a difficult thing to do. I only know of one who has fully embraced it. For the rest of us, we see the Force as more of a helpful companion offering advice. It’s wise to follow its guidance, especially when it warns of impending danger, but you are free to make your own choices.”
Slowly, I relaxed at those words. The brief fear that I might have gotten myself into some kind of cult dedicated to turning themselves into meat puppets for an eldritch horror energy being ebbed. Across from me, the Jedi stood and gestured for me to follow.
“Let us begin the next lesson. Much like the first, this one will involve your sense of the Force,” he explained as he walked into the ship’s small lounge area. A press of a button had the holo table descending into the floor, clearing up the space. Dooku held out his hand and, a moment later, a couple of small orbs floated out from his bedroom. Both of them lit up, coming to life as they powered on and hovered in place. “These are training drones. When activated, they will shoot a low intensity laser at you. Your goal is to use the Force to predict when they’ll shoot and from where, and to not get hit. As you progress longer without being hit, the pain level of the laser will increase, as will the frequency of their shots, while the patterns they fly will grow more random and more difficult to predict. When you’re hit, the lasers will reset to their last level.”
“How long will they go?” I asked, studying the orbs.
“As long as you’re willing to continue. They use voice commands, so to begin say the phrase ‘begin training session’ and to end, simply call out ‘stop.’ You can manually set the intensity and difficulty, but for now, it’s probably best to let it adjust to your own learning curve,” the older man explained, moving back to the corner of the room. “You’ll do this exercise without a blindfold until you grow accustomed to it, then we will begin cutting off your senses until you are using only the Force. First a blindfold, then a helmet that blocks out both sight and sound.”
“So I just dodge?” I asked, and the older man nodded, an amused smile on his face.
“If you can.”
If I can? I raised an eyebrow. I had a feeling this was some sort of test, to make sure I was actually physically qualified for the job. Or perhaps to determine if I was worth his time taking on as an apprentice, or if I should be put with the general population of students/hopefuls. The lure of freedom, the ability to get paid to cruise around the galaxy and do diplomacy, outside of any specific planetary or universal command structure, was too good to pass up. I needed to impress him so I would be fast tracked onto that future easy career track.
“Begin training session,” I called out and the two spherical drones began moving. I opened my sense of the Force up and listened as I tracked them with my eyes and ears. The sharpness I had gained with years of experience as a veteran aerial mage had dulled a bit over the years, even with my own training disguised as play, but I intended to knock the rust off before we reached Coruscant.
I was right to bring her. The Force led her to me, Jedi Master Dooku mused as he watched the young Zeltron girl dance between shots of laser fire. She moved quickly, her head on a swivel as she tracked the two drones firing on her, using the least amount of energy necessary to shift aside, dodge, and reposition as needed.
Her movements started off a bit shaky. To Dooku, it was a bit like seeing a Jedi who had been injured and bedridden for a while starting their training again. The instincts were there but there was a disconnect between what the mind knew and what the body could do—a gap that the person recovering needed to bridge, the challenge of mastering their own body again to overcome.
And yet… the longer it dragged on, the smoother she got. She stopped having to work so hard to focus on everything as senses other than sight took precedence when the drones began moving fast enough and putting themselves in positions where she couldn’t just turn her head a little to look between them—not without triggering the one she was putting her back to to shoot at her as its programming kicked in and took advantage. She had to move more, but she wasn’t winded at all. He mentally raised his estimate of her base physical prowess, because everything she was doing was done purely under the power of her own muscles and efforts—not a hint of her using the Force to move herself.
Eventually, the lasers started coming two and three in a second and one of them managed to connect. It was a glancing blow to the arm and would have been non-lethal, but it was enough to register as a loss in the drones’ programming. As a Jedi Master, Dooku had taken on three padawans to date—Rael Averross, Qui-Gon Jinn, and… the third student he didn’t like to think about, given what had happened. Suffice it to say, he had some experience teaching young padawans. Generally, he knew what to expect in any given situation.
In this case, he had seen padawans who had been training for years get frustrated or cry out in pain at the higher pain settings, when they got far enough along into a training routine. Young Tanya, on the other hand…
The girl panted, reaching up and pushing some of the white hair that had fallen out of place from her face. She was breathing hard now, but he wouldn’t say she was exhausted—just taking a moment to catch her breath. What worried him was the way she touched her arm, which would likely be tingling now as a reminder of the pain and to be more careful next time, and the smile on her face. Something about it sent a shiver down the old Jedi’s back, setting off instincts that told him this girl was dangerous despite her appearance. It was similar to the feeling he’d gotten when he had sat down across from her at that restaurant.
That hadn’t been malicious intent, blood lust, or a desire to kill—those he all recognized. Nor was it the look of madness. No, it had been more like… sitting across from an older Jedi who had just come from a war zone and was still on edge, still assessing everyone around them, measuring them, and deciding how best to kill them if they became a threat—and that self-assured certainty that they could do the deed if the need arose.
This, on the other hand, was harder to quantify. She clearly enjoyed it and liked the thought of the challenge. There was excitement there, and a bit of pride.
“Begin training session.”
He raised an eyebrow as she went right back to it without a word of complaint, her smile shifting from that threatening one that made his hair stand on end to something more pleasant. He didn’t need to reach out with his senses to guess at what she was feeling in the moment. He had seen battle meditation, or training as meditation, enough among the other Jedi to recognize it on sight—and the girl was a natural. It was like she was born to it.
Dooku watched, evaluating her form as she continued to improve. The improvements were smaller, but they came more frequently now, as she quickly adapted. He let his mind wander as her motions flowed smoothly, until eventually that smile returned and she leapt. She snagged one of the drones out of the air as it was about to fire, rolled, then brought the drone up to fire at the second one. The second drone dropped to the ground as its programming registered the hit as having disabled it while the second beeped and stopped charging since she wasn’t letting go—marking her the winner of this round.
Tanya tossed the drone into the air. “Begin training session.”
After a bit of introspection on the source of his unease, Dooku realized what it was that was bothering him. What it was that set his instincts off. It was survival instinct, buried deep in the human psyche. Who knew how many years and generations of evolution that had been imprinted upon humans and human offshoots to recognize certain signs, certain patterns. Like seeing a face in the bushes, or eyes in the dark. Some part of him recognized her as a predator.
That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing and wouldn’t automatically rule her out of being a Jedi. They still needed warriors with that killer instinct, even if most of their number were made up of those who would rather study and engage in soft diplomacy. As long as she wasn’t some sort of irrational, thrill seeking psychopath who took enjoyment from murder, it wasn’t a problem.
Or at least, it wouldn’t be if she were older. In a child? Those sorts of traits should be worrying. They would be, in fact, if Dooku hadn’t spoken with her. She was mature for her age—perhaps more mature than some grown Jedi he could name. Which, in a way, was almost as concerning. He knew that emotional maturity came soon for children of Zeltros—it had to, given their nature and talents. But mental maturity as Tanya showed was an entirely different beast. She was lightyears ahead of where she should be, compared to her peers.
It was clear from the way she spoke and acted that she preferred logic and reason. And yet, her actions and the emotions she displayed—not through her empathy, but in her body language and expressions—showed that she very much enjoyed the physical rush of simulated violence. It was… balanced, between reason and action. Of course, he couldn’t be certain until she was put through the fire, tested by the trials of life, and came out the other side, but Dooku had a good feeling about her.
The more he thought about it, the more certain he grew that the Force had in fact brought her to him. The only hurdle now would be convincing the council to take her in and train her. She wasn’t quite too old and without family of her own, there were no ties or attachments for them to worry about. The problem was that she was obviously quite willful.
I’m getting on in years, now. I wouldn’t mind stepping down from the Jedi council to take on a final padawan and train her myself, if it came down to it. Perhaps I could bring her to Serenno…
I was feeling a bit ragged by the time the ship dropped out of hyperspace above Coruscant, but I wouldn’t say it was any worse than my days in the war college in Germany—and certainly better than my college days in Japan, or the subsequent life of a corporate office drone. I was sleepy, physically sore, and had little numb spots all over but I felt like I had made progress.
I was much more confident about what I was doing when Dooku asked me to take us in and set us down at the spaceport nearest the Jedi temple, thanks to the hours I had spent at night studying everything I could on both general flight controls and those for this specific model of ship. I still used the Force to guide my actions, but this time I understood the reasoning behind it and what I was actually doing as I pressed buttons, flipped switches, and brought us in under manual control instead of letting the autopilot handle it.
As the ship fell through the atmosphere in a corridor cleared for us by the space port, I began to understand what the older man had meant about the Force offering advice and not being a puppet to it. I was coming in hotter than it recommended, but my own experience as an aerial mage and my reading up on the ship and its capabilities told me both that it could handle it and I could easily recover closer to the ground. It didn’t try to take control of me and make me do as it suggested—instead, it adjusted to what I was doing and seemed to pick the best possible path from there.
“I’ve sent word ahead to the council. They’re expecting us,” the older Jedi informed me as we touched down.
Once we were docked and I had the ship shut off, I looked over and asked, “Do you have any advice for me?”
Dooku hummed as he stood and we headed for the exit, where I grabbed the bag I’d left there this morning, expecting us to arrive around mid-day ship/local time (which was actually closer to evening according to my internal clock, still set for Zeltros). Finally, the old man nodded. “Be honest and don’t be afraid.”
“What can I expect?”
“They will conduct a series of tests to verify your sensitivity to the Force and ability to harness it. After that, they will ask you a series of questions to gauge your intent and reactions while probing you with the Force and feeling out how you react. Now do take care not to accidentally block their attempts, padawan. The rest of the council might take it poorly.”
Turning, I sent him a raised eyebrow and the old man sent me a sly smile. Message received. It sounds like any group of executives or ranking officers. There are always disagreements, either with individuals or the body as a whole. It seems Master Dooku would like me to tweak their noses a bit for him. Well, he did me a big favor by bringing me here and introducing me. It would be rude not to return the favor. It may reflect a bit poorly upon my job interview, but… one of their criteria is use of the Force and another is obviously someone who can keep their emotions in check. This would satisfy both of those and if they complain, I can feign ignorance and claim it’s a force of habit from shutting out other Zeltrons.
With my mind made up, I followed Dooku to a cab driven by a droid and we set out for the temple.
