“Hey!” I shouted. “Is there anyone out there?”
“Korshura amatashi jirada!” came a coarse voice from the fog; a lizard voice. I pointed my rifle at the sound.
The lizard men came from all directions at once, tusks in a grin, with other freaks of this alien world at their sides. They were all kinds of creatures: a red woman with horn-like tentacles for hair, bonded with a strip of leather; a pair of green male humanoids with eightball-like eyes, a snout for a mouth, and two saucer-like antennae on their heads, men dressed in armor from head to toe, another humanoid with eyes on three flesh stalks protruding from his head, even a metal construct with glowing red dots in its cylindrical head, its moves mechanical and precise. An ammo belt crossed its metal frame. Its dexterous fingers gripped a heavy duty machine gun. I waved my rifle at it. “Nobody move.”
“Your dialect of Galactic Basic is peculiar,” the mechanical man replied. “Who are you, what are you doing here, and why have you murdered my employee?”
“We’re the ones who should be asking questions here,” Jane said. “Why did your employee try to murder us?”
Cool under fire, I thought, check, and hoped they wouldn’t incinerate us for an answer. The red dots on the cylindrical head blinked twice.
“Information is never free,” it said. “We must bargain.”
The rest of its crew looked irritably confused and so I’d kept my rifle pointed at the construct’s talking tin can of a head.
“Where are we?” asked Jane.
“I will tell you for a price. Business is business, and information is certainly business.”
“What’s the price?”
“You will tell me everything you know about The Doctor.”
“The Doctor?”
My eye twitched as Jane mentined the man who got us into this mess to begin with.
“Sure,” she said. “We’ll tell you everything we know. But you must answer first.”
“Very well. You are on planet Dagobah. More specifically, you are inside a death stick dealer’s camp; I do not know who you are and you are certainly not welcome. The galaxy is in turmoil. Darth Revan has returned from the Outer Rim with an army of Dark Jedi behind him, and is bent on taking down the Republic. It is a time of Civil War. Business is booming.”
“Who’s Darth Revan?” I asked.
The cylinder-head ignored me. “Does that answer your question?”
“What are the Jedi?” Jane asked.
“A question for a question, that was the deal. It is time to fulfill your part of the bargain. Your clothes indicate you must possess knowledge on the one they call The Doctor, or, sometimes, The Immortal.”
“We don’t know squat about The Doctor,” Jane said before I could protest.
The red dots on the on the cylindrical head blinked again.
“Then this concludes our business deal, you primitive meat-bags. You are no longer of any use to me. I’m afraid we won’t be doing business agai –”
I squeezed the trigger before the thing had a chance to point its machine gun at us. A blast of white fire erupted from the barrel. The recoil threw me backwards and over the dead lizardman, sending me stumbling to the ground. The last thing I saw before falling: a wide,flameless explosion eating up the mechanical man, uprooting trees, and throwing its accomplices into the fog, the image imprinted in my eyes like a flashing daguerreotype.
I shook my head, trying to clear my brain from the concussion damage… but only emotions rushed in, pushing all rational thoughts aside.
I’d never had any real family. As I grew up, I’d picked up the qualities of every person I’d met according to my moral compass… until I met Jane – Jane, who was twice an orphan. She was like me… only better; and she was here because she feared nobody on Earth or beyond. I could respect that. Not to mention, she was also kind of pretty, and that was always a plus. The realization kicked in: I had no idea where she was.
My agitation helped me ignore the pain in my temples as I sat up on my butt, looking for any signs of her. The blast must have thrown her back too, but it was as if she’d disappeared entirely. I looked towards the murky green water. I needed her. I needed to save her… I tried to will strength back into my body and failed… but headed towards the lake anyway.
Half-crouched, half-deaf, one-third-alive, I made it towards the shore. “Jane?” I shouted, without hearing myself. “Are you there?”
It was a stupid idea. I had to jump into the water after her. But what if she wasn’t there? Or what if it was too late? No, I thought, it is never too late, taking off my leather jacket.
I felt a presence to my right, and as soon as I looked, I was shocked to find a man standing next to me, wearing a brown cloak like the one I’d seen back in the tavern. He’d even looked like one of the two men we’d met there, the man with the scar, only without the scar, and with disheveled long hair falling to his shoulders. His hand was extended towards the lake.
Jane rose from the thick water and levitated above the surface, sliding through the air towards the shore, limbs hanging limply at her sides. She landed on the mud as I stood there, mouth wide open. And here I was thinking I’d seen everything. The brown cloak approached her, touched his hand to her chest, and the next second, Jane was coughing up mud and water, looking more pissed-off than scared.
“You all right?” I asked.
She looked up at the face of the man in the cloak and concentrated for a few seconds on clearing her throat. “What’s your name?” she asked him.
“I’m Jared,” he said.
I noticed the metallic fingers on one of the fallen trees first; the rest of the sentient mechanical device soon followed. Its left leg and right arm were torn off its chassis, but it used its remaining hand to pull itself forward with stubborn determination. Jared turned to face it. The lights on the thing’s head blinked in crazed patterns.
“Jedi,” said the broken machine.
Jared walked towards it with panther’s grace. “IG-68,” he said, “you have failed to meet the conditions of our deal.”
Air shimmered behind the disfigured tin can man.
First only an outline appeared, but it soon shaped into a black cloaked figure some distance behind the torn up mechanoid. “The droid had made another deal,” he said, his voice a loud whisper.
Jared ignored him, never letting his eyes off the metal carcass before him. “One more thing,” he said. “I am not a Jedi.”
“Do not dismantle me please. I am sorry,” it pleaded.
Jared’s sword ignited with a silver ray of concentrated energy as he chopped the cylinder head off its metal shoulders. The head hadn’t rolled as much as sunk into the mud.
He then Jared bent his elbows, with his light sword parallel to his face, pointed vertically up, legs slightly bent at the knees, eyes locked on his future opponent.
The man in the black cloak threw back his hood. He wore a metal mask with stripes engraved into it, each engraving painted the red of faded blood. Only darkness lured in the slit for his eyes. “So be it, Exile,” he said.
Jane rose from the ground in a sudden jerk, as if a hurricane picked her up and threw her towards the masked figure’s extended hand. Both me and Jared rushed forward, but the figure in black simply nodded towards us and we froze in place like human statues. My muscles tensed as paralysis tingled my nerves; I couldn’t even move my eyeballs to see how our new-found not-Jedi friend Jared was doing. All I could do was watch the man in the black cloak hold Jane suspended in the air half a foot above ground.