The blue sun of Baros ain't up yet, but the heat's already whispering through the mesas like an old debt collector. I squat in the dim gray light, knees cracking against the cold that still clings to the soil like frost on a dead conduit. The avabush stalks stand prickly and defiant in their sheltered plot, leaves curling at the edges where last night's storm scorched them sideways. That blow twisted everything. Wind screamed down from the ridgeline and hammered through the rows like a thresher set loose, kicking alkali dust into every seal and joint on the property. Now the irrigation condenser sits warped, its vents choked with avabush fibers packed tight as wet mulch. I scrape the extraction tool along the intake housing, metal rasping against metal with a sound that sets my teeth on edge. Sap gums up my fingers in thick amber strands, sticky and sharp, that green herbal bite mixed with the mineral tang of Baros topsoil that seeps into your skin and never fully washes out. This patch is my lifeblood. Avabush grows stubborn on Baros ground, yielding fibers for ropes and textiles bound for rim markets, and the spice resin ships to Jedi Healing Centers for pain salves and sedatives. Medical license keeps it legal, mostly. Coalition labels it aid for worlds scarred from the wars and whatever Thalassian wreckage still poisons the soil. Out here it's another row to pull, another batch to process clean before the whole yield turns to compost.
My back locks up as I straighten, that dull seize in the lower vertebrae that started three harvests ago and settled in permanent. Sweat tracks down my brow and stings into my eyes before the sun has even crested. I drag my sleeve across my face, tasting salt and calcium powder on cracked lips. The condenser hums fitful behind me, its moisture pull weakened to a wheeze that wouldn't keep a single root cluster alive past noon. Baros carries enough atmosphere to breathe, but the escarpments trap thermal radiation like a kiln, and without consistent water cycling the avabush wilts to straw inside a day. I grab the hydrospanner from my belt, the grip taped where the housing split two seasons back, and kneel at the intake vents. The first bolt turns grudging under my palm, threads grinding corroded. I lean into it harder, shoulder muscles bunching, and force the rotation. A pop cracks loud in the quiet, sparks spitting bright in the predawn gray. Smoke rolls thick from the housing, carrying the acrid chemical burn of overheated coils that scorches my sinuses. I wave it off and peer inside. The core is warped beyond anything a field repair can salvage, heat exchanger plates buckled and fused where the storm surge cooked them. No water pull means no irrigation. That means wilted stalks by midday, a dead field by tomorrow, and a ruined batch that takes the whole season's margin with it.
Fresh parts from town. The calculation runs automatic, travel time against haggling time against installation time against hours the field sits dry. Every minute costs yield. The wind freshens a notch, carrying the spice-resin scent stronger off the rows, mixed with Baros' mineral underbite that coats the back of the throat like calcium chalk. The ferrite escarpments rise around the plot in weathered columns, sheltering from the worst lateral gusts but holding the radiant heat against the ground like a lid on a fermentation vat. Somewhere on the flats a Brubb herd grunts low, the sound rolling across the open ground in that deep vibration you feel more than hear. They keep clear of the cultivated rows. Smarter than most things on this rock, including the people.
I straighten and wipe extract and grease from my hands onto my pants, scanning the homestead. Lights flicker on inside, a soft amber glow that cuts the gray like a signal fire in a dead season. Sigrid's up. Caf's probably already on the boil, that bitter Baros-ground blend that tastes like engine coolant and keeps you vertical. Joren's still in his bunk, the boy lost in whatever fills a ten-year-old's head on a world this far from anything. The thought tightens something deep behind my sternum, a constriction that has nothing to do with the work and everything to do with what I dragged them into when I left Chandrila chasing quiet. Peace came, but it grew thorns.
A low whine slices the stillness, building from the eastern ridge like a blade drawn slow across stone. I turn and squint into the haze. A shuttle silhouette descends from the brightening sky, engines thrumming a frequency that vibrates in my chest cavity. It settles on the flat ground beyond the field perimeter, repulsor wash kicking a dust plume that rolls toward me and catches in my teeth. Coalition markings gleam fresh on the hull, crisp geometric lines that have never touched Baros soil before today. My gut cinches tight. The ramp hisses open and a rep strides out, uniform pressed and starched like he sealed it in a vacuum crate for the trip. Human, mid-years, that Core-world precision in his stride that says he walks on duracrete, not dirt. Routine probes, they label it. License verification, yield assessment, another layer of fees scraped off the top of a margin that was already thinner than topsoil on a butte ledge.
He approaches steady, boots crunching the dry ground in measured steps. I hold my position by the broken condenser, hydrospanner still in hand, and let him close the distance. The shuttle whine fades behind him but the air hums tighter. He stops a few paces off, eyes scanning the avabush rows with that evaluative sweep that tallies credits before acknowledging the crop.
"Vossar. Elias Vossar." He pauses, eyes cold as a holoscan. "NGC compliance check. License renewal's up. Time for quota assessment, let's see those yields."
I nod slow and set the hydrospanner on the condenser housing. "Yeah, that's me. Do you know what time it is? The sun ain't even poked over the horizon."
"Reg enforcement don't wait on daylight or farmers' gripes." He pulls a scanner from his belt, the device chirping as it powers up. Red light sweeps across the field rows, reading the growth density and chemical signatures of the stalks. "Jedi Healers flagged your last batch short. Still supplying med strains only, yeah? No bleed-off to the Pykes for their... recreational market?"
The accusation sits in my chest like swallowed gravel. I cross my arms, planting my boots wider against the soil. "Clean as ever. Just avabush for salves and fiber. You know, Coalition keeps spoutin' it's aid for war-torn dumps like this. You out here sniffin' for syndicates 'cause your Core bosses can't slap collars on 'em proper?"
He doesn't smile. The scanner taps and logs. "Pykes got eyes on every gray-market patch from here to Ryloth. Fields like yours scream prime for bumped yields. Bottom line, licensing fees due. Partial chit now, or we flag this setup for a full illicit spice investigation."
Wind gusts harder, pressing the avabush rows flat for a heartbeat before they spring upright, that acrid concentrate scent thickening in the air. The bitterness that lives in my throat on days like this rises hot, that old Chandrila rage that never fully composted into something useful. "Here's your kriffing partial." I shove the chit toward him, the metal warm from my pocket. "Tell that Vossar kin of mine to shove her regs straight up a sarlacc's gullet. Senate's fake 'unity' bull ain't feedin' my family out here."
He takes the chit without expression, scanner beeping as it registers the transfer. The red light flickers across the warped condenser housing, logging the damage in its data stream. "Damage logged. Irrigation's offline? Puts that next batch at risk, Vossar. License mandates stable ops. No excuses."
"There was a storm that hit last night. Fixin' it now, as you can damn well see." I keep my voice flat, but my fists ball at my sides, knuckles whitening against the resin stains. His gaze drifts past me toward the homestead where Sigrid's shadow moves behind the lit window, and the sweep of his attention across my property crawls on my skin like something with legs. He doesn't push the Pyke angle further, but the implication hangs in the air like residual fumigation, that thin gray territory where one bad inspection report converts a licensed operation into a criminal enterprise. Syndicates probe the Baros hubs constant, offering percentage cuts for enhanced batches, higher concentrate that sells fast in any redlight corridor between here and the Core. I keep the line clean, but the margin between legal cultivation and syndicate product is thinner than a membrane root. One motivated NGC auditor, and my family's livelihood evaporates. Me with it.
His scanner chirps completion. He pockets it and turns without a word of departure, striding back toward the shuttle. Engines whine up, repulsor wash billowing particulate that peppers my face and stings my eyes shut. I watch the craft shrink into the dawn sky, the blue sun finally cresting the eastern ridgeline and painting the rock faces in deep violet streaks that bleed upward into the brightening atmosphere. The air settles. The knot in my stomach doesn't. License fees are legalized extraction, and with the condenser dead, my yield projection just cratered. Town is the only option. Parts from the hub, and parts in Windscar Drift don't come cheap or easy.
I cross the hardpack to the homestead, boots grinding loose pebbles. The door protests on its hinge, warm light and the thick scent of caf boil spilling out over the threshold. Sigrid stands in the kitchen frame, arms crossed over her chest, her eyes sharp enough to read the trouble on my face before I open my mouth.
"Trouble already?"
"NGC rep. Another quota probe." I step inside. The air sits heavier in here, caf steam layered over the residual avabush processing scent that permanently inhabits the walls and furniture, that sweet-bitter concentrate bite that clings to fabric and hair and never fully ventilates. "Condenser's busted. Storm banged it up pretty badly. Gotta run into town for parts."
She nods, her jaw set in that way that means she's already running the same yield calculations I am. Her glance cuts toward the bunk alcove where Joren stirs under his blanket, the boy surfacing from sleep with the slow reluctance of someone who hasn't yet learned that mornings on Baros don't wait. He sits up, all gangly limbs and tangled hair, rubbing his fists against his eyes.
"Pa? What was that noise?"
"Never mind about my business, boy. Up now. Help hitch the cart." I ruffle his hair, calloused palm rough against the soft strands. He grins sleepy, legs swinging over the bunk edge with that elastic energy that belongs to bodies that haven't started accumulating damage yet. Sigrid presses a mug of caf into my hand, the ceramic hot enough to sting. I sip and the bitter kick lands hard, grounding the morning's chaos into something manageable.
"Won't be long." The caf burns a line down my throat. "Fields'll thirst by midday without that water access."
She grips my arm, fingers pressing firm through the sleeve. "You two watch yourselves while in the drift. Too many Pykes've been sniffin' around I hear."
"Always do."
I set the mug on the counter and move through the back door toward the livestock pen. The Brubb mounts snort and shift as I approach, their armored hides rough as cured bark under my palm, the natural plating warm from their own metabolism even in the predawn chill. Native beasts, bred for Baros' heavier gravity and rocky terrain, they pull steady without tiring where a repulsor sled would burn through its charge in a single trip. I hitch them to the cart frame, ropes groaning as I cinch the knots. Joren trots out behind me, his small hands fumbling the harness buckles with more enthusiasm than precision.
"We goin' far, Pa?"
"Just into town, boy. Parts for the greenhouses."
The cart rolls out light, loaded with tools and a bartering sack, nothing else worth carrying. That indigo sun climbs fast now, radiation building against the back of my neck like a hand pressing down. Sigrid watches from the doorway, her silhouette framed in the amber light, face unreadable at this distance but set in the way I know means she's holding words behind her teeth. I snap the reins and the mounts lurch forward, cart wheels grinding over the dirt track that winds between the basalt walls. Shadows stretch long across our path, the rock faces glowing in bands of violet and rust where the light catches mineral deposits. The NGC visit sits in my thoughts like a stone in a boot, that gray margin pressing tighter with every cycle. Medical license keeps us breathing, but one Pyke whisper near the wrong auditor and the whole operation rots from the inside out.
The track winds through narrowing slot canyons, the walls close enough to touch from the cart on both sides in places, stone worn smooth by centuries of wind channeling through at velocity. Joren chatters about the stars he tracked last night, pointing upward at sky he can't see anymore, his voice filling the silence the way water fills a dry channel when the condenser actually works. I nod along, reins loose in my grip, letting the mounts find their footing on the uneven ground. The boy's curiosity pulls outward, always upward, away from this rock and its grinding routine. I recognize the impulse. I had the same pull once, back when Chandrila's green hills felt too small and the galaxy promised something that looked like freedom. Freedom turned out to be Baros, avabush rows, and a broken condenser at dawn.
The canyon opens onto the ridge overlooking Windscar Drift's valley. The hub sprawls below in a disorganized cluster of shanties, fabrication dens, and landing pads, shuttles glinting on the tarmac like beetles caught in resin. Joren leans forward on the cart bench, pointing at a Brubb herd moving across the distant flats, their massive silhouettes rippling in the thermal distortion that rises off the valley floor. I tighten the reins and guide the mounts down the switchback descent, the cart bouncing over embedded stone that jolts through the axle and into my spine. The town noise builds gradual, a layered hum of commerce and machinery and too many species crowded into too little shade.
We roll into the outskirts where market stalls line the track in tight rows, awnings sagging under accumulated calcium powder. The smell hits in layers, spice concentrates from the local pharmacist's open vats, metallic tang from scrap heaps piled against every wall, cooked meat from a food stand that mingles with the chemical burn of welding flux from a fabrication shop next door. I guide the cart deeper into the sprawl, wheels rumbling over packed laterite scored with old wheel ruts and boot tracks. The escarpments hug the valley on three sides, their ferrite cliff faces radiating stored heat back down into the settlement like the walls of a slow-fired kiln. Traders shout from vendor rigs clustered near the central landing pads, voices overlapping in a wall of competing pitches. Joren hops down beside me when I pull the mounts to a stop outside the mechanic's den, his boots raising a puff of fine-grade particulate that hangs in the still air before settling on his pants.
"Stick close, Joren."
The mechanic's den spills parts across the caliche hardpack in front of its entrance, coils hanging from ceiling hooks in tangled loops that catch the light, circuit boards and drive housings stacked in bins without any visible system of organization. I tie the mounts to a post, their hides twitching under my hand as they settle. We push through the market throng toward the den entrance, bodies pressing close in the narrow lanes, elbows and shoulders and the occasional horn tip from a Devaronian trader jostling for position. Brubb handlers grunt low over their livestock while humans and Twi'leks bark prices across the gap between hawker platforms. Joren tugs my sleeve once, pointing at a vendor rig where avabush bundles sit stacked and priced at triple what I get per kilo at the source. I file the number and keep moving.
The path narrows near the central square where the commerce rigs press in tight on both sides and the crowd compresses. A voice booms from ahead, cutting through the noise like a shear through green stalks. A preacher stands on an overturned supply crate, robes weathered to the color of old stone, arms sweeping wide as he rails against the foot traffic.
"Brothers and sisters of the rim! Hear me! The so-called Reformed Jedi, those weak-kneed pretenders who've softened the sacred Code with their attachments and half-measures, they've crawled into bed with the ancient Je'daii heretics! Yes, heretics! Those Tython fools who dared whisper that the Force needs Bogan's shadow to shine Ashla's light. Balance? Ha! What balance in embracing the dark's rot, the chaos that devours purity like a sarlacc swallowing stars? They conspire in their soft bonds, twisting the Force into a chaotic duality, light and dark entwined like lovers in a den of vice! But I tell you, the true Jedi path is unyielding light! No dalliance with darkness, no gray muddles! The Je'daii fell because they courted Bogan, birthing the very Sith that scourge our galaxy. And now these reformed charlatans revive that poison, perverting the Force's holy essence for their 'enlightened' alliances. They accost the sacred with their balanced blasphemy, inviting corruption into every temple, every heart! Repent, you who listen! Shun their heresies, or the Force's pure flame will consume you in righteous judgment! The light demands devotion, unbroken, untainted! Join me, or be lost to their void!"
Guild traders nearby lean together and mutter, heads dipping close. Tool prices on the adjacent holoboards tick upward, riding the anxiety like parasites on a stressed crop. Joren looks up at me, brow creased.
"Pa, what's 'perverting' mean?"
I keep my stride steady, hand firm on his shoulder to steer him through and past. "Somethin' complicated, boy. Not our place, eyes on the path ahead."
The preacher's voice fades behind us as we clear the square, but the air sits heavier for it, that charged quality that comes before trouble the same way a pressure drop comes before a storm front. The mechanic's den opens ahead, parts spilling across the threshold onto the packed laterite. The owner hunches over a workbench inside, a burly human with grease smeared across his face in black streaks, thick fingers working a drive core with the practiced indifference of someone who fixes things for a living and has stopped caring what they're attached to. Tools clink against each other in a rhythm that sounds almost musical if you've spent enough time around mechanical work.
"Need a fresh condenser coil. Storm kriffed mine pretty bad last night." I lean on the counter, positioning myself where I can keep Joren in my peripheral vision. The boy fidgets beside me, gaze tracking across the tools hanging on the wall racks with the hungry attention of someone cataloguing things he wants to understand.
The owner grunts without looking up. "Storms are relentless this cycle. Got one here, decent shape, but it'll cost you. Barter or credits?" He drags a coil from beneath the workbench and drops it on the counter with a heavy clang, banging it once to shake loose the caked dust.
"Credits. Straight deal." I pull the chit from my pocket and run the quick arithmetic against what the NGC rep already scraped off the top.
He sets his current project aside, wiping his palms on a stained apron, and turns to rummage through a storage bin behind the bench. The hub's ambient noise pulses through the open walls, that constant layered vibration of too many transactions happening in too little space.
Blasters cock from the side. The sound is unmistakable, that hard mechanical snap of charging cells engaging, and it comes from three points simultaneously. Three Pykes materialize from the crowd's edge, rebreather masks catching the light, vibroblades strapped across their backs in quick-draw sheaths. The lead figure steps forward, voice hissing through his filtration unit with that processed sibilance that strips all warmth from language.
"Protection tax, sleemo. Hand over what's due, or we blast this scrap heap."
The owner's hands freeze mid-reach, his body going rigid the way livestock freezes before a predator strike. "I paid last cycle! This is Coalition turf..."
The second Pyke laughs, a wet rasping sound through his rebreather, and raises his blaster to center mass. "Kriff the Coalition. Hand 'em over, we won't ask nice again."
Joren's fingers clamp around mine, his grip sudden and tight. The crowd peels back from the confrontation in a wave, bodies pressing outward and leaving an open killing floor around the den entrance. I pull Joren behind a parts crate and press him low, my heartbeat thudding steady against the adrenaline surge, the farmer's calculation running underneath it all. Not my fight. Protect the boy. Get clear, get the part, get home. The fields are dying while I crouch here.
The air splits. A cloaked figure erupts from the retreating crowd, and a yellow lightsaber ignites with a resonant hum that vibrates in my molars and shakes particulate from the den's overhead joints. The blade casts hard amber light across the scene, throwing shadows that jump and shift with each movement.
"You dare to disrupt the Balance here. Yield or be prepared to be lost to chaos."
The Pykes pivot hard. Blasters bark in ragged sequence, plasma bolts scorching white-hot tracks through the space between the vendor structures. The Je'daii moves into the fire without hesitation, saber tracing a pattern that looks improvised until you see the bolts redirecting along precise vectors. The first deflection catches the lead Pyke's kneecap, his own bolt returned with surgical accuracy. Plasma burns through the joint armor and the tissue beneath with a wet percussive pop that echoes off the surrounding walls. He crumples sideways, a shriek tearing from his rebreather as he clutches the ruined joint, his blaster clattering useless to the packed laterite, raising a small cloud that settles on my boots where I'm pressed tight against the crate with Joren's face buried in my side.
The second Pyke throws himself behind a vendor cart and fires blind, bolts chewing into crates across the lane and splintering the wood in sharp cracks that scatter debris in a horizontal rain. The knight presses forward without breaking stride. Lightning arcs from his fingertips in controlled bursts, not the wild discharge of a storm but focused chains of blue-white current that grind into the cart's structural frame. The metal erupts in a cascade of sparks and buckles inward, flipping the cover backward and slamming the Pyke into a heap of ventilation components that clatter and ring like a toolbox kicked down a stairwell. He scrambles up with his mask cracked and his arm hanging wrong at the shoulder, the nerve damage from the electrical surge visible in the way his fingers twitch without purpose. Maimed badly enough that the blaster drops from his useless grip. His breathing comes ragged through the broken mask, but he lives. Enough to feel the fear that fills him.
The third Pyke lunges in close with his vibroblade whining at combat frequency, the oscillation pitch cutting above the chaos noise. The knight sidesteps with a lateral shift that reads like pure instinct, something no sparring ring could teach. His saber blurs through two precise arcs. The first severs the vibroblade at the hilt joint, molten sparks spraying in a fan that sizzles out against the packed ground. The second carves a shallow cauterized furrow across the Pyke's chest plate, deep enough to sear the flesh beneath but controlled enough to leave him standing. Panic takes over and his shots scatter wild, one bolt ricocheting off a parked speeder that roars to life on the impact, its engines flaring uncontrolled in a surge of thrust that screams against the confining space. The knight channels another pulse, lightning wrapping the speeder's frame in crackling tendrils that wrench it forward across the ground with a shriek of metal on stone. The vehicle barrels into the third Pyke and pins him against the mechanic's exterior wall with a crunch of collapsing armor and compressing bone. He slumps against the wall, broken and wheezing in shallow gasps, eyes wide behind his cracked faceplate, staring at the knight with the frozen recognition of something that knows it's been caught.
The lead Pyke, still grounded with his destroyed knee, locks eyes with the knight for one stretched second. The terror in that gaze is absolute. He begins dragging himself through the dust, his ruined leg trailing a furrow that mixes with the market's usual filth and spilled commerce. The surviving Pykes scatter into the crowd in a frantic scramble that parts the remaining onlookers in their wake. The knight stands in the wreckage, his breathing measured, saber deactivating with a clean snap that cuts through the residual chaos and drops the scene into relative silence. Smoke hangs in layered bands. The charred scent of cauterized flesh mixes with ionized ozone from the lightning discharge and the acrid chemical smell of a ruptured power cell from the wrecked speeder.
The crowd creeps back in, voices dropping to murmurs that build slowly like rain returning after a dry break. Joren stands rigid beside me, his eyes fixed on where the knight paused, his hand trembling with that odd vibration I noticed this morning. "Pa..." The word barely carries sound.
"Steady now, boy." I note the tremor again, file it deep where the things I don't have answers for accumulate. Not the time or place.
The knight turns to the mechanic, his presence compressing the space around him into something that demands response. "Drive core and shield emitters. Need them for repair on pad three-one-eight."
The owner nods, his hands still shaking. "Of course, no charge after clearing out those banthas. I'll have the parts delivered immediately."
The knight tosses a chit onto the counter regardless, his gaze sweeping once across the scene and catching on Joren for a moment that stretches longer than a casual glance before he nods, brief and unreadable, and dissolves into the reforming crowd. I rise slow, brushing debris from Joren's hair and shoulders.
"You all right, boy?"
He nods, but his attention lingers on the gap in the crowd where the knight vanished, pulled toward something I can feel him straining after the way a root system strains toward a water source it can sense but not reach. The mechanic curses behind us, kicking at the wreckage scattered across his workspace.
"Gonna take hours to sort this kriffin' mess. Swing back after midday. Gotta dig another coil from the back stock."
Another delay. The fields tick drier with every hour. I pocket my chit and calculate the cost of waiting against the cost of a dead crop. "Fine. We'll get some grub to kill the wait."
I steer Joren toward a food shack nearby, its awning sagging where a stray bolt scorched the support frame. We slide onto benches at a scarred plasteel table, the surface sticky with accumulated spills. A waiter drops two bowls of hubba stew in front of us, the broth steaming thick and brown, chunks of gourd floating in a spiced base that smells like every hot meal on Baros, heavy and earthy, built to fill a gut and nothing more. I spoon into mine, the gourd soft enough to break apart on my tongue, the spice cutting through the dry coating in my throat. Joren picks at his, spoon circling the bowl without commitment.
"That knight... he was strong, Pa."
"Strong don't mean that was the right way to handle that. Look at this mess his actions created."
The eatery hums with low conversation, traders exchanging rumors about the Pyke confrontation and that flash of yellow light. Market prices won't normalize until the debris is cleared, which means the whole hub operates at inflated rates for the rest of the day. Markup on a crisis, the oldest harvest in any market. Joren finishes his bowl eventually, pushing it aside with both hands. His tremor has settled, but the residue of it sits in my awareness like a reading I don't have the instrument to measure. The boy processes quietly, the way his mother does, holding the weight inside until it either resolves or becomes permanent. I sip warm water from a dented cup that tastes faintly of minerals and wait for the hours to pass.
The sun tracks overhead, pressing the temperature higher until the shack's awning provides shade without relief. Finally the mechanic's voice carries across the thinning crowd. "Vossar! Clear enough. Come get your condenser."
I stand, the accumulated weight of the day settling deeper into joints that were already protesting at dawn. Joren follows close, his stride matching mine out of habit.
We step from the mechanic's den with the replacement condenser wrapped in oilcloth and wedged under my arm, the weight of it pulling at my shoulder in a way that promises soreness by morning. Joren climbs onto the cart bench beside me as I secure the part in the cargo bed. The Brubb mounts shift and snort, restless from standing idle in the hub's noise and thermal saturation all day. I take the reins and crack them once, the snap cutting clean over the ambient commerce sounds. The cart lurches forward and the hub noise falls away behind us as we climb the valley road back toward the canyons.
Evening comes fast on Baros, the blue sun dropping behind the western escarpment and pulling the temperature down with it in a plunge that turns sweat cold on skin. The spiced avabush tang from the market fades, replaced by the sharp mineral rasp of wind off the ridgeline that cuts through clothing and finds the damp places where the day's labor soaked in. Joren talks about the knight, processing the spectacle the way he processes everything, out loud, turning it over in words until it sits flat enough to hold. His voice steadies as he talks, the tremor absent now, but the memory of it occupies a growing space in my attention. I think about how this delay has eaten most of the daylight, the replacement part finally secured but the installation still hours away, the field's root systems pulling moisture from reserves that won't last through the night without intervention. Every cycle, some distant authority stirs up complications that cascade down to the rim and hit hardest where the margins are thinnest. Licensing hikes, syndicate pressure, infrastructure that ages faster than the credits come in to maintain it. Policy decisions made in climate-controlled senate chambers that translate into dead crops and empty accounts on worlds like this.
I guide the cart into a narrow defile between two basalt faces to save time on the return, the rock walls closing in until the sky narrows to a strip overhead and the shadows pool thick enough to swallow the ground at our feet. The wind channels through the gap in a low whistle that sounds almost vocal, carrying faint echoes of the hub behind us that distort against the stone into something unrecognizable. The mounts pick their way careful over the uneven footing, hooves clicking against exposed rock. Then a harsh rasp tears the air ahead of us, raw and guttural in a way that stops the mounts mid-stride, their hides twitching under the harness. A cloaked figure stands in the corridor's narrowest point, one hand extended toward a thug who hangs suspended off the ground, clawing at his own throat with both hands, legs kicking in spasms that scatter loose gravel. The figure's voice comes low and certain, filling the stone corridor without effort.
"The eternal will claim its payment in full, scum."
The words bounce off the canyon walls and layer over themselves, building that cold resonance that presses against my chest like a change in atmospheric pressure before a system collapse. Joren stiffens beside me on the bench, his whole body locking in a way that goes beyond fear into something I don't have a name for. That tremor returns in his hands, visible even in the failing light, a vibration that seems to originate somewhere deeper than muscle or nerve. The instinct that kept my livestock alive through three bad seasons screams at me now, that same reading of conditions that tells a farmer when the weather is about to turn lethal. I curse the shortcut under my breath.
The figure's hand clenches tighter, fingers curling inward with a deliberation that makes the gesture look almost tender. The thug's gasps convert to wet gurgles, his face swelling dark under the hood's shadow, veins distending across his temples like irrigation lines overpressured to the point of rupture. His boots scrape shallow furrows in the corridor floor, the sound small and desperate against the stone walls. Then something gives, a soft structural sound like a green branch twisted past its tolerance, and the body sags. The figure releases. The thug drops to the ground in a folded heap, his neck angled in a way that no living spine accommodates, eyes open and reflecting the narrow strip of darkening sky above. No theater in it. The cold efficiency of a grower pulling a diseased stalk from the row, the calculation that preservation requires selective elimination. The metallic taste of fear-sweat hangs in the defile's trapped air, mixing with the mineral chill of the stone.
The figure turns toward us, slow, as if something in the air caught his attention the way a current shift draws a predator's focus. His eyes carry a luminous intensity under the hood, a conviction that burns past reason into something that calls itself faith. He steps closer. His hand extends toward Joren in a gesture that sends ice water through my veins, fingers probing the air between them with a searching quality that makes my skin crawl.
"Child... your spark calls to the eternal. Come. Embrace it. This power'll forge you strong, unbreakable, shield those you love from the galaxy's horrors."
The words settle over us like contaminated rainfall, sweet on the surface and poisonous underneath. I lunge forward off the bench and plant myself between the figure and my son, boots grinding into the stone, every fiber of my body compressed into a barrier. The reins slip from my hands and slap against the cart's frame. Joren's tremor intensifies behind me, his small frame rigid with something that reads as terror and recognition tangled together in a combination that frightens me more than the figure does.
Shouts erupt from the dark gaps in the corridor walls, raw and furious, a pack sound that comes from multiple directions at once. Thugs pour from the shadows, blasters already firing, plasma bolts streaking through the narrow space and slamming into the stone around the cloaked figure in explosive bursts that shower sparks and rock fragments across the corridor floor. The figure's attention snaps from Joren to the assault, and a hilt appears in his hand. A red blade ignites with a vicious hum that resonates in the confined stone space until I feel it in my teeth and the bones of my hands gripping the cart's edge. He spins into the incoming fire, the crimson arc cutting through the plasma bolts with an aggression that makes the Je'daii knight's precision look like restraint.
A redirected bolt catches the nearest thug between the eyes, the plasma punching clean through and dropping him backward against the rock face with a sound like a full grain sack hitting stone floor. The figure lunges forward, blade carving a descending arc that takes an arm off at the shoulder joint, the limb separating in a cauterized seam that releases a puff of acrid smoke into the corridor's trapped atmosphere. The attacker screams once, short and shocked, before the return stroke takes his legs from under him in a lateral slash that folds his body onto the corridor floor in a configuration that stops resembling anything human. Another thug fires desperate, the bolt skipping off the red blade's edge and punching back into his partner's midsection with a kinetic transfer that flings the body against the basalt wall hard enough to leave a dark smear on the stone. The red blade thrusts forward through the remaining shooter's torso in a single fluid penetration, the hiss of tissue cauterizing around the plasma edge carrying through the corridor like steam from a cracked pipe. Bodies hit the ground in sequence, the fight converting to slaughter inside the span of three breaths, the corridor floor accumulating the fallen in overlapping angles that block easy passage.
I grab the reins and crack them hard enough to split the leather, the snap echoing off the stone walls. The mounts bolt forward, cart wheels bouncing over loose rock and something softer that I don't look down to identify. We clear the corridor's narrow section at speed, the sounds of carnage compressing behind us into a diminishing echo that the wind carries away as the canyon walls open into the broader track leading home.
The homestead appears on the horizon as the last daylight bleeds from the sky, the avabush greenhouse rows standing in dark silhouette against the purple dusk, patient and thirsty and unchanged by anything that happened in town or in the corridors between. I've heard the old hands talk about what the Empire did to operations like ours, nationalization programs that stripped rim producers bare while Core-world distributors carved the margins into personal wealth. The names change. The mechanism persists. Coalition, Empire, Republic, whatever banner flies above the extraction apparatus, it lands the same way on a family pulling its livelihood from soil that barely cooperates. Force users rise and fall in the spaces between, carrying convictions that break the ground under everyone caught in the radius. To a farmer tending rows under a foreign sun, they are weather events. You brace for them, you survive them, you repair what they damaged, and you get back to the work that existed before they arrived and will continue after they're gone. The galaxy's grand causes don't water the fields or mend the condenser or keep a boy safe on a road that should have been empty. The only thing that matters is the ground under your feet and the people who share it.
I glance at Joren. His face is pale in the dying light, that tremor finally subsided but its absence somehow louder than its presence, a question I don't know how to ask settled into the space between us like something planted that hasn't sprouted yet.
"Listen here, boy. Don't go blabbing to your ma about that little trouble. Telling her we almost had our tickets punched? That's my job."
He manages a small grin, and for a moment the day was no longer a heavy burden.