Light of the Jedi(47)
The Council thought Jedi might be needed in the Outer Rim more than usual during the crisis. So far, though, the blockade didn’t feel much different from the usual sort of outpost life. For Jedi Padawan Bell Zettifar, that meant constant orders from his master to do utterly impossible things under the guise of “training.”
The wind kicked up, pushing Bell back from the cliff’s edge. He inhaled the unique scent of Elphrona—hot metal and dust.
The Order often built its outposts to fit in with the natural surroundings and culture of the planet where they were based. The outpost on Kashyyyk was a huge tree house. On Mon Cala, it was a gigantic raft grown from coralite, kelp dangling from its underside, providing a reeflike habitat for local sea creatures as it drifted with the currents.
Elphrona was a dry world of slate and clay, topographically diverse. Almost its entire surface was covered by long mountain ranges, composed primarily of iron and other ferrous minerals, which curled along its surface in arcs that followed the pattern of the planet’s magnetic fields. From orbit, it looked beautiful—like a calligrapher had inscribed the entire world with some unimaginably enormous pen. From the ground, it looked exactly like you would think a huge ball of dusty metal might—a world whose bones were close to the skin.
In this hard place, the Jedi had built their outpost out of a mountainside, or rather into it. A face of the iron mountain had been sheared away, carved with laser chisels into a columned templelike entrance. The entrance was flanked by two massive statues of Jedi Knights, their lightsabers out and held in the ready position. The Jedi wore hooded robes of a style that felt like a nod to an earlier era. Above the doors, a gigantic symbol of the Order, the upswept wings embracing a spear of starlight shining up and out into the galaxy.
Bell didn’t love Elphrona—he would have been happier with that Mon Cala posting, for instance, where breezes smelled of sea and life, not rust—but he did love the outpost. It was simple and majestic at the same time. Everything the Jedi should be.
It was dawn, and the rising sunlight caught the electrum of the Jedi symbol, setting it alight with reflected fire. The view from the clifftop where he stood could not be improved. It was perfection.
Bell Zettifar, Jedi Padawan, soaked it in. Then he began to turn around, intending to tell his master, Jedi Knight Loden Greatstorm, that he was not ready for this particular exercise today, and wanted to read up on the techniques a bit more before he just jumped off a perfectly good cliff.
“I believe in you,” he heard Loden say from a few meters behind him.
Bell felt his master reach out to the Force, and then something like a hand in the center of his back. And then he was shoved hard, right off the cliff.
* * *
Some thirty kilometers away was the settlement of Ogden’s Hope, a fairly large town built and maintained on the dreams of those who thought they might be able to transform the planet’s mineral wealth into a fortune of their own. The mining industry on Elphrona was over a century old, but the planet’s governments over the decades had successfully resisted the efforts of the huge galactic concerns to buy up and consolidate its resources. The entire planet was divided into a grid, and no one family, corporation, enterprise, or association was allowed to own more than four claims at a time.
That meant much of the planet remained unclaimed, and who knew what treasures might be waiting under the surface, ready to be discovered? Earlier strikes had turned up rare minerals, aurodium and platinum, even stranger substances—a vein of crystals, once. Elphrona was a planet-sized treasure vault, and somehow, it belonged to everyone who lived there. Ogden’s Hope, as a place, was well named. It was a place of possibility, where everyone had an equal chance at success and freedom. Chancellor Lina Soh cited Elphrona often in her speeches as emblematic of the spirit of the Republic. It was a hard place but, generally, a good one.
To this good place, a family had come, from a populous, wealthy world in the Core. A mother, a father, a son, and a daughter. They acquired two claims next to each other, an hour’s speeder ride from Ogden’s Hope—longer if you ran into a rust storm. They built themselves a place to live, with the help of their droids. The first version was just a rough, ugly structure of permacrete, nothing more than a shelter from the sun and wind, but in time it had become theirs. More rooms, more windows, a greenhouse, a second story, decoration, all the little touches that transformed housing into home. They dug into the soil, looking for whatever treasures might be beneath their feet.
The family could have used their droids to do most of the work—but that was not why they had come to Elphrona, and so they all did their part. The children studied with their droid tutors and grew taller every day. The parents worked, and planned, and believed they had made the right decision for themselves and their family.
Until one early morning, the mother, whose name was Erika, looked up from a delving droid she was repairing to see a strange cloud not far from their home. It was odd, unlike anything she had ever seen. For one thing, it hugged the ground like a fogbank. But Elphrona was a dry world. There was water, but it circulated deep below the surface in underground rivers and channels. Rain was a onceper-decade event. So, fog…no. It couldn’t be.
Even beyond that, this cloud looked odd…it had a sheen to it, like a metallic blue. Like a storm cloud, really, though she hadn’t seen one of those since she left her homeworld some years back. And it seemed to be moving with direction, or purpose. Toward them.