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The Crossroads 2002 short story by Louis Turfrey Thirty-eight
years after Episode IV – A New Hope The
contract was legal, but Ranth wondered just how he
was going to pull it off. He’d told his agent to pick big fishes, people with
a lot of money on their heads, no preference on whether they be brought in
dead or alive. His agent had been true to his old form and had given him a
really big fish, one that would be difficult to put down. Three weeks of taking on different identities, meeting
and sometimes coercing old contacts, burying himself
in what was once the independent Setnin Sector, had
brought back many memories, both good and bad. Today he needed to call on the
aid of an old friend and confidant; a man he could trust. Standing quietly, waiting for the subject of his
attention to pass by, he relaxed into what he called hunting mode. It
was becoming more than second nature to him, and he could feel the changes
running through his body and mind. Something had started to happen recently,
something both he and the man he used to be, had not envisaged.
Whatever people called it, be it second sight or sixth sense, he had
developed an uncanny knack for knowing when someone was going to draw a
blaster on him. It gave him an edge he hadn’t had since becoming a full Jedi,
but that was a lifetime ago. He had that feeling now. As he
watched from the shadows, the man walked across the street away from his
friends and towards the alley where he now stood. Ranth armed his
blasters, setting them to stun. He had received many startled reactions since
he had resurfaced. Many of them resulted in misfires; near misses and once he
had nearly killed a man. He did not want to kill Jan Lomona. Jan moved across the street and thought wearily of
exactly what he had let himself in for since raiding the Bank of Zelon. His thoughts were still on this subject when he
felt a familiar tingling in the back of his mind. He turned quickly, and in
one smooth motion brought his blaster around and into the helmeted face of
someone when he never expected to see again. He stood there for a second
before realising he had two similar looking blasters aimed at his midsection.
He smiled and holstered his gun. “Ranth? Is that you?” Tar Ranth nodded in
affirmation. Lomona
split a wide grin. “Dammit, you old
frecker! I’d heard you’d resurfaced.” He patted his
friend enthusiastically on his back. Ranth, feeling
embarrassed, holstered his guns and released the catch on his helmet, taking
it off and slamming his hand on Lomona’s back in a
similar greeting. “Resurrected
would be a better analogy. I notice you’ve improved your fast draw
technique. You were almost quick
enough as well. Old man” Jan frowned and looked at the man who now stood next to
him. His youth was apparent, but this was definitely Tarr
Ranth, or Tar Ranth
as he now preferred to be monikered, legendary
bounty hunter and Jedi. He smiled at the familiar face. “What do you
mean, almost?” Ranth looked on as the silhouette of
the Berone Sunrise gently lifted off
of the surface of the planetoid and back into space. He noted to himself that
Lomona hadn’t lost his touch and hoped he would get
reinforcements here in time. He started triple checking his armour, knowing
that what he was about to do would rely on all his skills and ability. Ranths armour was well suited to movement in a vacuum,
being completely sealed off from the rigors of space. Tough environmental
controls with quadruple redundancies protected his comparatively fragile body
from the extreme temperature ranges and the armour itself was tougher than
any conventional spacesuit. His target was currently located in a large structure
that had been half clamped and half buried in the side of the planetoid. He
smiled to himself in anticipation, feeling the adrenaline rush that always
preceded a kill. It’s time, so he set off on a gentle loping stride.
His calculations told him that it would be half an hour before he arrived at
the base and he had a comfortable margin of two hours worth of air. Aaron De’Athe stood at the window
that looked out upon his hidden planetoid and watched the sun set over the
hills less than ten kilometres away. Something had disturbed him and yet he
couldn’t pinpoint what it was. The curved horizon that was the edge of the
planetoid showed up clearly as it rotated away from the sun. In three hours
it would repeat the process, but Aaron would not be there to see. Their
security had been compromised.
Somebody – he didn’t know who – had tortured one of his acolytes into
giving the information of their whereabouts.
It disturbed him that there was someone out there who had as little
regard for life as he did, for although the acolyte had survived the ordeal,
he was a faceless mask of mangled flesh. Literally. He was still looking out the window when something caught
his attention, the glint of light on metal from the foothills. He enhanced
his senses through the Force and looked harder. Nothing, but that sense of
foreboding was growing. He opened the communicator on his desk. “Re-direct all
patrols to area ZZ9 Plural Z - Alpha. Let me know what you find.” Ranth experienced the feeling again,
but this time it was different. This
time it seemed…directed. He dropped to the ground in the low gravity
environment and thanked his lucky stars that the surface contained little
particulate dust. He waited for fully two minutes before rising again and
heading into the shadows of the foothills. Seven kilometres, seventeen
minutes, and he would be at the edge of the base. Now was the time to be
extremely wary. Now was the time to arm his weapons. Patrol 63 slid effortlessly over the surface of the
planetoid, the two suited acolytes riding easily on their modified repulsor skiff. “I have a feint
metallic reading, no bio. Let’s report
it in.” The acolyte did not seem nervous but his colleague was
more experienced. “The Master is
in a very dangerous mood today. We
should double check everything before reporting it.” The other man nodded, and the two suited figures turned
the skiff in the direction of the reading. Ranths helmet display came to life as
the tracking scan hit the armour. He cursed and set the bio suppression field
on. This was not good; he had been detected too early. He set the power on
his suit to full, redirected his orientation in mid-stride and engaged his
modified jet pack. There was a single burst of flame and the low gravity did
the rest. At two hundred kilometres an hour he accelerated towards the hidden
base on a smooth parabolic curve. Seventeen minutes became seventeen seconds and
as he approached the base his suit scanner told him there were four patrols
ahead, one behind. He smiled to himself, knowing full well they didn’t stand
a chance. “Brotus, what is it?” Aaron walked swiftly into the small
operations centre and found his new colleague trying to interpret the garbled
signals being sent between patrols. Commander Brotus
looked up and swore to himself that he’d seen a brief glimpse of the fury
that he knew the man was trying to suppress. “One man
seemingly covered in black armour is heading in our direction. He’s evading all your patrols with ease. He
seems to know where they are.” Aaron could feel his face start to pale as the blood
drained away and fought to maintain his equilibrium. “Images?” Brotus nodded and flicked a long-range
fuzzy image on to the main view screen. “Enhance it
please.” Brotus did so and as the computer
interpolated a more accurate representation Aaron felt his blood go cold. Ranth cut the jet pack, released the
clips, and remotely sent it up into space. As the pack went one way on full
burn he went the other, landing gently on a maintenance hatch. Seconds later
he was inside the base and heading towards two Dark Jedi,
their lightsabres already activated… “Sir, he is
inside the base and heading in this general direction. We have engaged him
but so far there have been two casualties and several severe injuries.” The acolyte handed the report to Aaron who drew back as
if stung. The flim dropped lightly to the floor.
Cursing his weakness he pulled himself up straight. “Brotus, stay here and continue to direct the evacuation. I’ll
face this…man myself. Ask Agent Omega to meet me in the medical corridor. It
seems as good enough a place as any to hold our ground.” It had been too easy, way too easy. His initial
suspicions were correct, he was sure.
He was being directed and he didn’t like it. Ranth
turned a corner and this time it was his turn to freeze in place. Something
was badly wrong. The corridor widened out, becoming approximately five metres
wide and extending for another fifteen metres. The ceiling was at least five
metres high, or so his helmet informed him. That sense of warning was there again and so he moved
forwards with caution. He found his hand reaching for his lightsabre,
a weapon that he instinctively knew how to use but did not have. He
hesitated, then holstered his weapon. Something told
him to rely on his wits. The lights had been dimmed at the far end of the
corridor and Ranth had to zoom in before switching
to low light mode, lest he blind himself. Two figures stood there,
silhouetted against the darkness. One of them had an extremely high heart
beat, the taller and thinner of the two. “Come out where
I can see you and you will not get hurt.” Ranth
spoke emotionlessly but felt an excitement he had not experienced since his
literal rebirth as a bounty hunter. He knew things were changing; that the
suit he wore was meshing itself into his sub-conscious mind the more he wore
it. And there was something else as well; the Force abilities that had
apparently been bred out of him were resurfacing once again. Is this a
manifestation of a reintegrated consciousness, a meshing of the old and the
new? He thought so. His Force ghost had used the last of its strength to
try and reintegrate into his body, and Ranth was
sure that the joining had been at least partially successful. Now would be the test. There was the snap hiss of two lightsabres
igniting simultaneously, and the potential assailants moved forward into the
light. Ranth was shocked to see who his second
assailant was. “Trude? Is that you?” The woman moved forward, both grace and animalistic
strength seemed to ooze from her. Aaron De’Athe
held back and grinned as he saw Ranths reaction.
She growled in answer to his question and he saw fire in her eyes. Eyes?
This couldn’t be Trude; she had lost her eyes years
before, plucked out by her insane brother. It must have been an
impostor. Aaron sneered at Tar. “I thought I’d
finished you off Ranth. I thought you were dead.
Today I will make sure of it.” He signalled for the Trude
impostor to move forward, which she did cautiously. “She’s superb isn’t she?
Grown using the same technology that helped grow me. Unfortunately for you,
although she has an understanding of language, she is still emotionally
restricted. She knows only anger, rage and hate; an ideal grounding for a
Dark Side acolyte.” She leapt forward incredibly fast and Ranth
barely got out of the way of the blade in time. Something was wrong here and he
could feel it. She furiously attacked him, driving him backwards with the
speed of her blows. Still Ranth avoided the blows,
but he was unable to defend and this time he did not have the Force to guide
him – or did he? Relaxing into the fight and letting his adversary use her
energy to the full, Ranth moved around the corridor
like a dancer. Pushing off of walls, jumping high and ducking low. Always
managing to beat the blade, he continued to look for an opening. All he
needed was a chink in her armour, a gap in her technique, but he was having
trouble finding one. Then she over lunged in her eagerness and he had her,
firing a nerve toxin dart into her midriff. It took only a millisecond to
work and she stopped in mid-slice. The blade flew out of her hand,
deactivated, and instinctively without knowing why, he reached for it. It
landed neatly in his palm, pulled there by the Force. The energy flowed down the blade and he once more stood
before Aaron De’Athe, but this time his aims were
different. “Move aside
Aaron. Its not you that I have come
for. Its Brotus.” The Dark Master frowned and Ranth
felt his hesitation. “I said move
aside. I have no warrant on you but I will
destroy you if you stand in my way.” The Dark Jedi smiled and deactivated his blade, standing
to the side of the corridor and raising his hands. “Be my guest. He is in the operations room, two floors
up, three doors down.” Ranth was surprised by this
turn of events but wasn’t about to look a gundark
in the mouth. As he ran past Aaron, he felt a dark wave of cold hatred and
knew that the Dark Master had not yet finished with him. No one challenged him as he ran towards the operations
centre, the corridors empty of personnel and droids. Ranth
briefly saw a power droid running down a dark corridor, but little else. He
slowed as he came to the corridor leading to the operations centre. The
feeling of foreboding was rising again, this time much stronger. As he
rounded the last turn, he saw Brotus. He waited, in
one hand a crimson lightsabre, in the other claw
shaped appendage a small energy shield. “Ranth. The infamous bounty hunter turned Jedi. How are
you alive? Are you as old as you seem, or an illusion projected into my
mind?” Brotus
paused as he thought. “No matter.
Either way you will die, Jedi scum.” He attacked without warning, causing Ranth to defend with a weapon he had not used before, his
captured lightsabre. “I’m no illusion
thief. I’m here to inform you
that you are to surrender to me for trial for the theft of Imperial property.
If you refuse to comply I am authorised to apply force. With extreme prejudice.” The Ki-Ki laughed as he caught Ranth’s
blade and deflected it with his shield. A spin on his heals and the clawed
hand ripped into the chest plate of Ranth’s armour.
Ranth was shocked at the speed. Nothing should have
been able to do that and instantly all but the most basic electronic
functions shut down. Ranth leapt sideways into an
office, slamming and sealing the door behind him. There was the hiss of melting
metal as Brotus’ lightsabre
started to melt the door seals. Ranth released and
removed his helmet, looking for a way out. The only exit was a large
observation window that showed the foothills by which he had approached the
base. There was a hiss as the first of four seals dropped off
the door. Ranth replaced his helmet and activated
his lightsabre. This will have to be timed just
right. Brotus burst through the door and saw Ranth on the other side of the room, standing in front of
the window. “No way out
Jedi.” He reached out and lifted a desk, slamming it into Ranth
and almost crushing him against the glass. Ranth
fell to the ground, barely able to stand from the impact. Brotus
moved over and, abandoning his lightsabre, started
to rip at Ranth’s armour with his clawed hand. “Did you think
this would be easy? How dare you try and arrest a Ki-Ki!
You insolent piece of garbage. Die and go back to the pond of slime where you
were born.” The blows kept coming down on Ranth;
pieces of body armour started to fly off and beneath his
bloody skin was exposed. Ranth fought back,
knocking the commanders feet out from under him and
planting a hard kick to his jaw. The warrior fell backwards into a storage
shelf and Ranth followed up with a high punch and a
quick jab. The jab was expertly blocked and a punch came down on the helmet.
Two claws pierced the helmet and almost took out Tar’s eye. Ranth was picked up bodily and thrown across the room,
where he managed to land without injuring himself. Immediately he was
punched, his helmet clasping free of its locks and flying off to one side.
Within seconds his face was a mass of pain as punch after vicious punch
pummelled into him, each one followed by a scream from the now battle enraged
Ki-Ki soldier. “Die, die,
die, die Jedi!” Brotus kept repeating the
litany whilst Ranth fought to keep conscious. He
nearly passed out twice, barely avoiding the blows. Then two things happened
almost simultaneously. First, there was a large cracking sound from the back
of the room, and second; Ranth blocked Brotus’ punch. Using the force of the punch to throw the unprepared
warrior over his shoulder, he reached into the Force and with all his
remaining strength propelled the commander across the room and into the
observation window. As the warrior hit the window, Ranth
leapt sideways, grabbing tightly to the cable he had previously embedded in
the floor. There was a crash, a crack
and then the world exploded around him. Brotus gave
a brief scream as he managed to lock his fingers onto the window frame, a
growing crack appearing in the glass behind him where the centre section had
been knocked out. Ranth attached the cable to his belt.
Moving across the room, Ranth could just hear the
warrior screaming curses at the Jedi, their forefathers and their potential
fatherless ancestors. Something snapped and he struggled over to the window,
rage forming an icy fire in his brain. Fighting against the noise Ranth came to within a metre of the warrior and started
screaming back at him, accentuating each word with a kick to the warriors fingers. “I am not a
Jedi! I am a bounty hunter!” Ranth’s last phrase and the kick that
occurred with it knocked the Ki-Ki commander once
more into the window. Brotus was held fast by the
suction from the hole in the plexi-glass, then the
room became momentarily quiet and Ranth watched Brotus’ remaining arm get sucked into the hole, tearing
sounds of bone and flesh almost deafening as the powerful suction shredded
his limb away. Brotus’s
howls of pain were feral and wild, but Ranth
couldn’t contain a smile as he walked towards the Ki-Ki
and leaned in close. “That’s for
making things difficult.” He rasped as he hit the emergency shield and stood
back as the metal shutters slammed down like a guillotine, removing Brotus’ arm at the shoulder and casting him into
unconsciousness. Ranth stepped back and collapsed
on the floor. For the first time that
day he suddenly realised just how close he had come to death. Another grin
spread across his face as he picked up the still body of his captured bounty
and noticed the man standing impassively in the doorway. “Hello Blake.” The Crossroads 2002 short story by Louis Turfrey Thirty-eight
years after Episode IV – A New Hope Histories – The true return of Tar Ranth,
meeting up with Jan
Lomona and being prepared to ignore
the evil force user Aaron
De’Athe in order to get to his prey, Ki-Ki commander Brotus. Showing much of the ruthless nature of
previous Ranths, this Louis Turfrey
tale cements the return of Ranth to Setnin, and
the fray that is the Ki-Ki/Setnin War. Cast
of Characters Tar Ranth Blake De’Athe Commander
Brotus Aaron De’Athe Jan Lomona Blake De’Athe |