Jedi Knight Fiach Dubh’s Missions

[Fiach Dubh]

It was a relief to enter the narrow opening of the cave. She could not stand, but the cool sand under her fingers felt good. She shook out her cloak and brushed the sand from her face and hair.

She crawled along the cool, damp sand, feeling her way in the darkness. She sensed as much as saw a small opening ahead and squeezed through. Immediately the air felt different and she knew she was in a larger open space. The blackness turned grey.

She waited a moment, then lit a glow rod.

The Jedi, Kenna, sat against one wall. His wrists and ankles were tightly bound. A Gag was stuffed in his mouth. Kenna’s eyes went wide.

“Don’t worry, it’s me,” Fiach called.

“Mmmmfff!” Kenna struggled against the gag and he beat his feet on the floor of the cave.

“All right, I’m coming,” Fiach said, hurrying towards him himm. She reached toward Kenna’s gag even as he attempted to talk.

“Trap!” Kenna exhaled the word as Fiach removed the gag.

“Wh–” Fiach’s question was cut off as she heard a loud rushing noise behind her.

 

[Fiach Dubh]

Sand and rocks were pouring down from overhead, piling up against the cave entrance. There was nothing she could do. Larger rocks spilled down, wedging in against one another tightly. In only moments, the cave opening was sealed and they were buried alive.

“I’m sorry, Fiach.” Kenna said, “He left me here to die, but he was hoping you’d find me. When you crawled through, you tripped a slow-acting lever that deposited all that debris.”

Fiach nodded. She felt foolish for once again walking into a trap.

 

[Fiach Dubh]

Briefly, Fiach attempted to cut through the rocks with her saber. But they crumbled into sand, which filled up the spaces, packing the landslide even tighter. She wiped the dirt off her face with her sleeve. “Did you come up with a plan whilst you waited for me?”
Kenna shook his head.

Fiach walked around and found two more glow rods and lit them. She prowled around the cave, pawing through the bins and containers – all of which were empty.

Suddenly, she raised her glow rod. She went over to study the wall of the cave and saw that they were braced with slender metal poles.

“Do you think the cave would collapse if we cut a few of these down?” Kenna asked.

Fiach gazed around the cave, noting the number of supports. “I’m no engineer, but I bet you can take some of these out. What are you thinking of doing with them?”

“They’re shiny,” Kenna said. “And they look pretty flexible. I’m thinking if we can get them through the rocks and sand, we can signal the outside.”

“What outside? Isn’t it just desert out there?”

“There’s a tribe nearby,” Kenna said. “They scavenge for food. Someone might see it.”

Fiach activated her lightsaber and carefully began to slice through the slender metal pole. It peeled back from the wall and Kenna stepped forward to grab it. A stream of dirt rained down on his head. Fiach scrutinised the ceiling above. “It’s all right,” she said. “I think it will hold.”

They wiggled through the opening and crawled forward. It took trial and error, but first Fiach, then Kenna threaded the slender pole through crevices in the rocks. Kenna hit a rock and wiggled the rod, trying to force it through. The rod snapped.

 

[Fiach Dubh]

“We’ll have to try another,” Kenna said.

Fiach sliced through a second pole. She eased it away from the wall and had to jump back as a chunk of loose dirt and rocks cascaded down. She heard a rumble overhead.

Kenna and Fiach went back to the cave entrance and tried again. Kenna tried to guide the rod through the tiniest of cracks. He pushed, pulled, prodded, and manoeuvred but he got no further. Sweat streaked through the dust on his face. His gaze locked with Fiach’s. An unspoken agreement passed between them and Fiach took the rod.

This time she closed her eyes as she gently moved the rod. Together they called on the Force.

Fiach felt it gather power around them. The sand and rocks were part of them. They were connected to everything around them. She could feel the tiny rivers of space through the packed debris.

Fiach manoeuvred the rod carefully. She felt it poke through. She wiggled it. “I think it’s out in the air now.”

“Good. Push it out as far as you can,” Kenna breathed. Slowly, Fiach pushed the rod through until she only held the very end. She wiggled it.

“Maybe if the wind dies down, the sun will glint on it,” Kenna said. Fiach wasn’t sure if the wind ever died down in that canyon, but she didn’t tell Kenna that.

 

[Fiach Dubh]

For the next few hours they took turns crawling through the narrow cave and holding the rod. They turned and twisted it carefully, in case it could catch a ray of sun.

They split Fiach’s survival rations, but it did little to satisfy their hunger and thirst. The air grew close and hot. They barely spoke or moved in order to conserve what little oxygen they had left.

When Fiach’s turn came again, she took the rod from a weary Kenna. She lay flat and wiggled the metal. She was tired from the battle with the Darksider. She could not remember the last time she had slept. But she would lie here and stay alert as long as she had to. As long as there was hope.

“Hello in there! Is anyone there?”

“Yes! We’re trapped!” Fiach shouted.

“I am Goq Cranna. Who is there?”

 

[Fiach Dubh]

“Goq Cranna, I am Fiach Dubh! I am a Jedi. I have a companion here, also a Jedi. As you can imagine, we need your help.”

“Ah, then it is good I stopped. Stay back, Jedi. We will dig you out.”

Fiach crawled back into the cave. Kenna sat propped against the cave wall, exhausted.

“Someone called Goq Cranna has found us!” Fiach said. “He’s digging us out.”

“Thank the stars and planets,” Kenna said fervently, “and the Force too,” he added.

It seemed to take a long time for Goq to dig out the opening. At last light streamed in and they saw the orange blaze of sunset.

“The wind dies down at dusk, or else we would not have seen the silver rod,” Goq said. “Even though we were searching. We saw the dead pilot and knew someone had been here. We went into hiding. But then when we emerged we met a pilot who was had returned to pick up a passenger. We both figured you had to be nearby and needed our help.”

Fiach felt a little uncomfortable for not instantly trusting the pilot – but was glad her final assessment of his character had been sound.

 

[Fiach Dubh]

Kenna spoke. “Did you actually see anyone else?”

“Close enough to touch,” Goq told him. “I was nearby when he called someone on his com-link. Someone was trying to persuade him to do something and offered him a cut of a potential fortune if he did so.”

“Did you hear if he accepted, or where he is headed?” Fiach asked urgently.

“I merely heard stray words,” Goq said. A look of blankness had come over his face. Fiach recognized it. It was the look of someone who did not want to get mixed up in a stranger’s business. Fiach shot a glance at Kenna.

“Surely you picked up some indication of what she was up to,” Kenna said gently, his hand on Goq’s shoulder.

“I do know where he is headed…Ziost.”

 

[Fiach Dubh]

It was a cliché, but Fiach had a bad feeling about this. Having rescued Kenna – or had he rescued her, it was hard to tell – she headed for Ziost.

Alone.

Situated in the Outer Rim Territories, its history was as dark as a Sith planet could be. It was famed as the original site of an ancient Sith ritual altar. And like so many planets before it, it was rich and fertile – before the Sith had their way with it.

Fiach felt the planet even before it appeared on the monitor of her ship. She sensed it had seen her, as she now saw it, this seemingly harmless world of blue and white and green. To unopened eyes and dead senses, this planet would seem a world much as any other: a world with oceans and landmasses, heavily, practically entirely forested, with two white, ice-capped poles on either end. White clouds drifted lazily above it.

But it was not a world like any other.

It was Ziost. Former homeworld of the Sith.

Fiach’s lilac eyes focused on the slowly turning planet in front of her. It gazed back at her, and she felt a sense of disgust. The Dark side had that effect on her. It made her feel unclean and she found its presence a cloying, oily experience.

 

[Fiach Dubh]

Her decision to travel alone was not because she was not a team player – far from it. Of late she had taken assignments to not only be part of a group, but to lead them too. It was an aspect of her development she had focused specifically on.

Instead, her choice was because she knew that every Jedi looked at things differently. They were not an army. Their discipline came from within. Each Jedi has his or her own connection to the Force. She was learning to trust her feelings and hone her instincts. And right now Fiach had a strong feeling and was following it. And oddly, she was usually cautious, whereas now she felt it right to act swiftly.

 

[Fiach Dubh]

With no coordinates or even a hint at where she was headed, Fiach did what she invariably did – she trusted in the Force. And that faith took her to one of the polar ice caps. In truth, a lot of this planet was now covered in ice, but her destination was as far north as you could get.

The ice lay beneath her craft like a cracked snowball, or at least the glimpses she could see through the misty atmosphere were. She continued to follow her instincts, as her ship got lower an she headed towards white-pocked glacier fields.

She skimmed low under the afternoon sunlight where ice chips burned bright below the whitish sky. She darkened her viewport shields to cut down the glare. And, as she approached a line of rocky hummocks, Fiach spotted a blackened hulk lying in the snow, surrounded by a starburst of greasy soot and various items of wreckage.

She sensed nothing alive yet something told her the crash was recent, but not too fresh.

 

[Fiach Dubh]

She brought her ship down near the wreckage. She double-checked with her scanners. The metal was cold. Ambient temperature. It must have been here a few days at least, maybe as much as a couple of weeks.

Fiach opened the uniform locker and removed an insulated jumpsuit hanging beside a pair of full environment suits. She pulled on the uniform, activating the body heater and tugged on gloves. As someone raised on a desert planet, she did not cope with the cold all that well. She clipped her lightsaber and shoto to her belt.

She climbed out of the ship into the blinding cold, leaving the door closed but not sealed, so she could re-enter in a hurry. She shivered as she walked. She felt frost already collecting on the skin of her cheeks.

 

[Fiach Dubh]

Her boots crunched on the ice-crusted snow as she walked to the wrecked ship. She bent over the scorched hull plate. No doubt a smuggler’s ship, she mused. But why here? She picked up a twisted lump of metal, turned it over in her gloved hands, then let it drop. Her breath curled in white steam from her mouth. “If they crashed, why no bodies” she said out loud.

The icy air sliced into her nostrils like razors. She re-examined the landing pattern. The ship landed safely and then exploded on the ground. None of the snow was ploughed up. There’d be a long crash furrow if it came down from orbit. Which means they either took shelter nearby, or their bodies will be where the cold became too great.

The wind picked up, skirling around the rocks in transient whirlwinds that whipped ice crystals into the air and scoured the snowdrifts. Fiach spotted, through the swirling ice, an opening to an ice cave flanked by rocks.

 

[Fiach Dubh]

As she approached the opening to the cave, a blaster-cannon emplacement – white and therefore camouflaged against the backdrop – suddenly came to life. The turret swivelled, the long deadly barrel seeking a target…and finding one.

Fiach sensed the attack and dived to one side, using her Jedi powers to fling her farther. Steam boiled from a fresh crater in the ice. The turret swivelled, targeting Fiach, and fired again. She leaped into the air, and the beam missed her, exploding one of the frozen rocks.

As the blaster cannon fired a third time, Fiach drew her lightsaber and deflected the beam with blinding speed, countering the bolt with the energy blade. The sheer power of the blaster cannon made her reel, and she felt a bone fracture in her arm as she withstoodd the blast.

Fiach leaped forward with all of the power she could muster – covering the distance in a single bound. Landing in front of the cannon, she scrambled up the tower and slashed with her saber, severing the barrel of the weapon.

She looked up and noted that the weapon had been jury-rigged, sensors wired in with automatic targeting systems, linked to motion detectors. She wondered why someone would go to all that trouble on this empty world.

 

[Fiach Dubh]

With a reluctant grinding thud, a shield door appeared a little way into the cave as it split in the middle and began to spread apart. Icicles flaked off, and chunks of snow crashed to the ground. Figures appeared, shadowy forms standing in the crack of the partially opened door.

Fiach tensed and turned around, her lightsaber gripped in her hand and waited to see what her mysterious enemies would do. A man wearing white plasteel armor stepped outside, holding a blaster rifle. Beside him came another, also carrying a blaster rifle. They did not point their weapons at her, though. Instead, they seemed to watch for some invisible threat from the snowy wasteland.

“Don’t just stand there,” a gruff human voice shouted. “Get inside quick, before those creatures come back!”

“Creatures?” Fiach responded.

“Yes,” the man continued as Fiach hurried inside. “Narglatches. Seems there is a healthy number of them here. Which is why we came,” he stole a glance at three other men inside the former cave. “This was to be a hunting party. Except our ship crashed and now we seem to be the prey.”

A second man took up the story. “They’re usually solitary hunters, so we thought we could pick them off one by one. Seemed an easy way to make a lot of credits. There were ten of us initially, four guides and six customers. Now it’s two and three.”

 

[Fiach Dubh]

Fiach sensed the brooding terror surrounding them in the unheated makeshift room. The first man grew more animated as he spoke. “We bagged ten of them by the time the pack attacked,” he said. He ground his teeth together, and a flush rose to his cheeks. “They simply kept coming, and we had to retreat.”

“How did you let yourself get so vulnerable?”

The man stared at his fingers, nervously twining and intertwining them. “Like I said, until then it was easy. They hunted alone and we were too much for them. Bag one or two, and then leave. But somehow, these monsters had learned how to work together. I thought they were dumb brutes – all teeth and claws and no brains. But I seems I was wrong.”

Fiach shook her head. “No, you’re right – at least that’s how they operate. If they’re working as a pack…” she left her words hanging, her thoughts working out the apparent coincidence that she’d followed someone here and she’d encountered what must represent atypical animal behaviour.

“I was on the trail of someone who travelled to this planet on the back of a get very rich quick deal. Add that to your narglatch situation and I suspect someone has genetically mutated them. And if your trip wasn’t precisely top secret, I suspect you were the trial for their effectiveness. And if you checked out your ship forensically, I bet it was no accident you crashed here.”

“Trial?” One of the other men spoke, and she presumed he was one of the rich hunters.

“Deadly creatures that could hunt in a pack? They’d be a valuable commodity. But who’d pay for something like that without seeing them in action?”

The man nodded, his business brain clearly picking up on the concept quickly.

“There is enough room on my ship to get you all out, then I can return for whoever is behind all this.”

 

[Fiach Dubh]

“We’ve been here four days,” the first man said. “No supplies, and those things are out there waiting for us. We couldn’t even send a distress signal. Do you have weapons in your ship?”

Fiach shook her head. “Weapons? No,” she admitted. “I don’t exactly need them.”

“We got the blaster cannon working,” the man said. “Rigged motion detectors to fire on anything approaching. But you sure took care of that. Now we got no defences other than those doors – so I think we’ll be taking you up on that offer.”

“It’s getting dark,” the businessman pointed out. “Shouldn’t we do something as soon as we can? We’ve got only a dozen charges left in our blaster rifles,” he added. “We won’t last long if we’re under attack. But we’ll just have to make the most of what we have.”

Helping people was one of the primary responsibilities of a Jedi Knight, and she could not turn down even poachers and unscrupulous hunters such as these.

Coiled and tense, the group stood from the empty storage containers they had used as seats and readied their blasters. The two military types readied their rifles.

“Let’s do this fast,” the leader said, heading to the outer shield doors. “We can make a dash for it... since we don’t have to worry about the motion sensors anymore.” He scowled at Fiach.

“Leave the door partially open as a fallback option,” the businessman suggested, “in case we need to make a hasty retreat.”

Fiach sensed an interesting shift in command. The military man was the nominal leader, but the businessman was no doubt equally proficient in making decisions under stress. The two men seemed to have formed a team for their own survival.

 

[Fiach Dubh]

The shield door opened, and freezing air and snow gusted in. The sky had turned a hazy purple as the day drew to a close. Fiach led the five survivors in a sprint past the wreckage of the exploded big-game hunter’s ship to her own.

Fiach focused her senses on the others, concerned that the desperate refugees might try to blast her in the back and take her ship – but she sensed only a gnawing fear. These people were too frightened to worry about treachery.

As Fiach approached her ship sitting calmly on the snow, she saw that the hatch stood open, like a dark mouth. She said quietly, but loud enough for the men to hear “I didn’t leave the door like that.”

Fiach bounded up the ramp and inside in the cockpit, the comms system had been torn to shreds, the panels ripped open with a scoring of claws. The navicomputer was gone, torn from its housing and smashed to a tangle of wires and broken chips. Severed cables dangled loose from the other controls.

It was as if the creatures knew exactly what they were doing.

She turned behind her to the locker where the environment suits had hung – and found that the snow creatures had slashed both of the suits, making them unusable.

Then came a shout from outside, a panicked outcry and sudden blaster fire.

 

[Fiach Dubh]

Fiach charged out of the cockpit, leaping down the ramp.

She could barely distinguish the creatures that blended so perfectly with the snow and rock. Their blue pelts were almost white and so they appeared no more than a blur of movement, as the six metre-long creatures came rushing at them, claws like knives extended as they approached, slashing and tearing and roaring.

The leader of the hunting party drew both of his blaster pistols and fired, leaving a huge creature dead in the snow with smoking holes in its fur. He tried to fire again, but one of his pistols had been drained dry. The creatures bellowed, setting up an odd howl that careened across the empty steppes like a tidal wave of terror.

The other warrior fired carefully and precisely, taking out another creature. The remaining monsters pushed forward. One of the businessmen shot indiscriminately, lancing the snowy distance with blaster fire until his blaster ran out of charge.

 

[Fiach Dubh]

With an echoing roar, Fiach turned to see a huge narglatch standing on a rock out-crop, larger than the others, howling into the night as if directing the battle.

In unison, the army of ice creatures surged toward their victims and lunged in a mass of blue-white fur, spread claws, and flying blood.

Fiach’s lightsaber opened a sizzling, blackened gash through he closest creature’s rib cage, and it fell to the snow, gurgling hot bile.

Then she lunged, decapitating another creature as it leaped toward the group, its fanged mouth open and ready to tear flesh.

The leader of the hunting party fired until he emptied his second blaster pistol. His face held a haggard hopelessness, yet a foolish determination. Fiach knew he would keep fighting until the creatures took him down.

The businessman shouted. “Jedi, we’ve got to get back to the base. Can you clear us a path with your lightsaber?”

Fiach nodded curtly. The heavy shield door under the icy overhang was their only sanctuary. She felt a sudden relief that they had left the shield door partially open so they could dash back inside.

 

[Fiach Dubh]

The second warrior fired the last trickle of charge from his blaster rifle, just as a huge creature rose before him. The man shouted an obscenity and thrust the blaster rifle toward it like a blunt spear, punching the attacking monster below the sternum. The creature roared in pain and lashed out to knock him to the snow, his shoulder ripped in a sequence of parallel furrows, spraying red.

Fiach advanced and the monster forgot about the wounded warrior and bellowed, turning to face the Jedi. The man, heavily wounded, backed away, trying to scramble to his feet as his blood stained the snow.

From the rocky outcrop where he directed the battle, the solitary narglatch roared something incomprehensible. Other narglatches turned on one of the businessmen. They tore him apart.