Revenge of the Jedi/Part 2

''Cold. So cold.''

The malevolence of Docharvee, Eriadu's only moon, was subtle. Though too thin to support indigenous life of its own, Dorcharvee's atmosphere was the right mix of breathable gases for most sentients; standing still, one could perhaps exist indefinitely with no greater inconvenience than a slight shortness of breath, and even moving about the daily activities of life, the worst a fit being would endure was an occasional need to pause for as deep of breaths as possible. The rocky terrain just barely covered the rich veins of ore that, in eras past, had gone a long way toward feeding Eriadu's insatiable appetite for raw materials its planet-spanning factories could consume to excrete industrial goods. The thin atmosphere, too, meant weaker weather to trouble the prefabricated colony buildings that had expanded into prefabricated cityscapes, harvesting and concentrating oxygen to provide for Docharvee's mining towns and the facilities that grew up to accommodate them.

Docharvee would be no one's vacation destination, but there were far worse places a mining crew could get assigned, and even a casual spacefarer who landed on the moon could manage a decent time if she stayed inside air-rich buildings or moved from one to the next at a meandering pace.

Not so for a hunted Jedi. A Jedi Knight could not enter any building on Docharvee—not when the whole system had been subjected to news of Lord Darshkére's triumph over the Republic alongside his new master, and their jointly-offered bounties for any captured Republic prisoners or Jedi. A Jedi could not afford to stroll from one craggy dune to the next; bounty hunters had come to Darshkére's call like piranha beetles, and while most of them were combing the debris between Eriadu and Dorcharvee, several had seen the pockmarks and craters still smoking on the moon's surface and understood that not every Republic agent had fought the battle to its end—or been able to. A Jedi would have to flee at fast, even Forceful pace, day after day, straining the body's reserves all the while; a Jedi Knight could focus the body to process air more efficiently than any Forceless being, but not forever. In the end, Docharvee itself need only be what it was; a Jedi Knight's own body would kill itself, the breakdown and backup of biological byproducts poisoning the system until it reached critical failure.

For the casual visitor Docharvee was palatable, if not pleasant, but for a hunted Jedi it was death. And death was cold.

How long had it been since the battle? A week? Two weeks? The sun rose and set as Docharvee turned, but when a Jedi could not even sleep, snatching only an hour of meditation here or there when the closest hunting parties stopped to eat, hours and days ran together in a blur of pain, headaches and hunger and perpetual shortness of breath wreaking on the body the havoc that grief and loss inflicted on the soul.

Yan Razam had not been the only agent of the Republic to crash on Docharvee, nor the only Jedi, but she had the fortune—whether good or ill—of taking the impact better than anyone else. The remembering burned like her lungs—soaring down in her Aurek starfighter, laserfire all around her, engines shrieking at full throttle as she tried and failed to reach her wingmate, Kayce Ny-no-Kald. Sparks had shot through the cockpit, threatening to blind her, as the enemy fire caught her at last; even as she spiraled to ground, the Force had been cruel enough to turn her plummeting fighter so she could watch Kayce's explode. She hadn't needed the visual—Kayce's scream in the Force had bundled up Yan's nerves and twisted them until she was screaming too—but now the image would be with her until the day she died.

Which might, as she thought about it, be today.

Driphan was the only reason she had survived this long. Like Yan, he had ejected from his doomed starfighter; unlike Yan, he had come down on uneven terrain. Looking for it, Yan had seen the bulge in the thigh of his flightsuit where his snapped femur pushed against the fabric. Driphan had injected all the painkiller shots on his belt, but all the painkillers in the galaxy and the Force on top of them wouldn't have let him walk away. But then, he hadn't intended to.

"Go," he had rasped; that many stims had put a glassy film over his eyes, but they had both been pointing at her. "I'll hold them as long as I can."

"They'll come after me anyway! We'll take them on together!"

"And die together? That's stupid.  Just go.  They won't hunt for you until it's too late, they won't think one Jedi would leave another."

Yan knew he had only said it because he'd ingested enough painkillers to put a Forceless being into a coma, but staying to get shot would've been less painful. "Because we shouldn't! Never leave a wingman, remember?"

"Mission first, men second," Driphan had retorted. Gesturing to his leg, he'd said, "I'm dead, Commander, and if I go with you I'll slow you down and get you killed too. Go and pay 'em back for me later."

She had gone, in the end, Force speed carrying her half a klick away before the first fighters swooped down to investigate. Crouched on a ridge, struggling to breathe, she had watched Driphan's end, then crawled beneath a spit of rock to let the patrolling fighters pass by. She had emerged from her hiding place and started away only to fall down screaming as, between Docharvee and Eriadu, the Crescentia died and hundreds of Jedi died with it.

And since then…near hits, long treks through empty rockscapes, abortive raids and discovery and lightsaber blows…Yan's already-blurry vision had become a haze, and out here in the cold, there were few heat sources for her iskra to define…she could barely breathe, and she could feel the toxins in her own body, beyond her ability to fight any longer…and it was cold.

So cold.