3.09

Know where enemies will aim

See yourself where they won't

Find the path between the two

After months and months of practice, it suddenly occurred to me that jedi defense had more in common with Sun Tzu's Art of War than all the action scenes in the Clone Wars series. A significant part of a Jedi's wading through a battlefield without wearing armor was not wading through a battlefield at all. No matter how heavy the blaster fire in an area, only a tiny percentage of said battlefield's volume was ever under fire at any given time. Thus to defeat an enemy attack, a Jedi should simply not be where the said attack was aimed at. What was between impractical and impossible for most people was very much doable for those that instinctively sensed the future and could tell probability to shut up and sit down; even the fastest droids took time to decide on a shot, aim for it, and actually take it, time someone who saw the attack coming could use to sidestep it faster than they could decide to adjust their fire. The more well-planned the action, the easier it would be for a force-sensitive to not be there at all.

Know where attacks will fall

See yourself where they won't

Walk the path from one to the other

Training lightsaber held at the ready, I walked through the valley of Arkanian scientists testing their toys and knew no fear. It was not a particularly hurried walk yet nor was it slow, every step is taken both almost casually and with deliberation as low-power blaster bolts burned against the ground, sonic pulses screamed as they passed by, hypervelocity darts cracked through the air, not one of them finding their mark. All weapons are, to some extent, inaccurate. Even if one could build a beam weapon with perfect aim and no divergence, inaccuracy would still be created by the weapon mount needing to move and track the target, weapon components heating and expanding unevenly, or minute vibrations from the weapon's surroundings. Such factors could be neither fully compensated for nor fully predicted, even with super-advanced machines and moon-sized computers. But the Force, unlike technology, could and did ignore the uncertainty principle, even twisted it to the wielder's advantage. An inch was as good as a mile when it came to not being hit, and most weapons had inaccuracies much higher than that.

Know where blows will land

See your saber where they will

Forge the path that joins both

As the half-foot spheres floating overhead multiplied, the weight of probability grew heavier and heavier. The more training remotes that fired at me, the higher the number of attacks needing tracking and avoiding. It felt like trying to dance on increasingly uneven terrain; not technically impossible, but increasingly unfeasible for my level of skill until stumbling became a certainty. Perhaps Yoda could dance on the head of a pin and/or march through an entire battalion with nary a shot finding its mark, but I was no eight-hundred-year-old epic-level goblin. So the training lightsaber came up, batting aside shots that could not be dodged or evaded. The shimmering yellow blade flashed from point to point in a blinding blur, forming what was a solid wall of light to the unpracticed eye.

Find the paths

Walk the paths

Forge the paths

Combine them all in one

It is said that the human brain can't truly multitask. That's obviously wrong; there are many activities that use multiple different muscle groups simultaneously, performing multiple different coordinated actions at once. Yet attempt to break up those activities into different actions consciously, moving individual limbs instead of dancing, and you'll ignominiously faceplant sooner rather than later. Using the Force felt like this. It could be channeled to help you towards a task. It could be seized and demanded upon, to perform one. Trying to shape it to detailed, precise plans? It blew up in your face. So joining my every act on the battlefield into a single, flowing, conceptually singular activity came far, far easier than its individual parts. I was asking (or demanding, when I felt frustrated) the Force to defend me from harm, not performing the individual activities that made that possible. It was counter-intuitive as Hell for someone who had grown up with science, where analyzing the process was better, but after months and months of practice, I finally reached the end of the testing track for the first time.

"Yes! Take that, oh so superior Arkanian weaponry!" I panted out as the artificially enhanced gravity cut down to normal, let me do a little victory dance. Copious amounts of the sweat of a sickly, yellow-green color flowed in rivulets down my body as the atmosphere cycled out the mixture of eight percent oxygen and ninety-two percent of various non-lethal but debilitating toxic concoctions for something nominally breathable, and temperature and pressure normalized as well.

"I suppose celebrations are appropriate," Professor Magrody said as he walked into the testing area with an ominous-looking, many-pronged device cradled in both arms, "but it would be unprofessional of me not to finish with a complete bioscan and give you a clean bill of health, young lady."

"Absolutely not!" I shot the old man my best glare. A complete scan would take at least an hour and I'd been cooped up in mad scientist country for far too long. "There's nothing wrong with my health, the Force made sure of that. And if it is, then its your peoples' fault anyway! We've been doing tests for fifty-six days straight, each one with even more implausibly hostile environments than the last." From the Professor's unimpressed expression, I knew that my little tantrum was not having the desired results, so I searched my memories of teaching children in a previous life and put Astra's teenage girl's body in the best pouting form I'd ever seen. "I need a break, Professor. I want to see Father, and Ratty. Visit the new dig site and see what the excavation team unearthed." That last one was kinda important, given what the 'new dig site' really was; ruined and abandoned for millennia or not, Sith libraries were still dangerous. "Can I go? Please?"

"Well, when you put it that way..." the old man said, and no sooner had he lowered the bioscanner than I had him in a rib-crushing hug. Except not really, because with genetically engineered, Force-enhanced strength I could crush a super battle droid if I hugged it hard enough.

"Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou!!!" I shouted, happily and loudly enough to literally rattle the walls. What? Happiness is an emotion too, as much a passion as any other, and it magnified the strength of my voice to painful levels. Now, if only I could actually use that with any sort of control...

"I think you can let me go now," Professor Magrody said somewhat breathlessly and I did so instantly. I might have diverted the man's career away from future Death Star design; didn't mean I wanted to hurt him. "I can see you're healthy enough young lady. This... force technique to negate poisons has to be working or you'd be unconscious - did you get it from the old Praxeum's archives? I guess we can delay the scans until after the-"

A new presence exploded into my awareness at the same time as a tall, pale-skinned, red-haired woman jumped from behind the aging Arkanian scientist where she'd probably been all along without anyone noticing. Before I could react, she shot me four times in the chest in under half a second, the crackling blue bolts sending waves of agony like streams of magma through my nerves. Despite enhanced biology and genetics or Force shenanigans, I found myself lying on the floor, limbs shaking.

"Never drop your guard, brat," Aurra Sing said as Magrody gaped at her and I tried to muster a credible glare despite being thoroughly disabled. "It will get you killed one day."

Of course, she'd say that - she could pull off the whole hide-in-plain-sight trick on Anakin bloody Skywalker!

"Now finish the bioscans, old man," Sing ordered the Professor. "Her father pays me to protect her life, and the number of people I've seen die by poisons or wounds when they thought they were fine is too high to allow such childish shenanigans."

xxxx xxxx xxxx

​

We had taken a transport to the new dig site but I didn't have time to enjoy the gleaming valleys of ice and crystal as we flew over the glacier-covered mountains. I was too busy being angry at my bodyguard for that. She was no longer 'Aurra', or even 'Aurra Sing'; she would henceforth be known by her job description or appropriate definitions of character such as "that bitch" or variations thereof. The bioscans had lasted not one, not two, but three whole hours... followed by almost an entire day of mandatory stay in a bacta tank for neural regeneration. A combination of toxins, extreme effort, and periodic shocks over the two months of the tests had caused subtle minor damage that had only been revealed when the nerves in question had been exposed to significant disruption. The Force would have taken care of it in a week at most, but at both my bodyguard's and Professor Magrody's insistence I had to go for a long slime bath just to be safe. Or to be at peak condition on the off-chance I had to fight or run, as the bitch had put it.

In the distance, black specks amid a slightly greyed-out patch of ice marred the otherwise pristine landscape of one of Arkania's wildest areas, a plateau far from any city or domed settlement rumored to be populated by crystal spiders, Arkanian dragons, and even worse beasts. The only dragon discovered by the dig teams so far had been the same one Ratty and I had encountered in Arca Jeth's old Praxeum, possibly drawn in by the currents of the Force in the area. They were less a calm river here and more like a rapid stream, twisting and turning as it crashed against rocks, and when I focused I could see the haze of pale red against the planet's normally silver-white glow; dark side influence, but ancient and mostly faded. Faded or not, the dig teams all had security droids floating overhead, armed with military-grade weapons in the hope that they would repel or at least delay any dark side threats as easily as they had the dragon.

The transport landed without a sound, floating over the uneven terrain on repulsorlift engines. The rear cargo door opened to reveal a massive dig site nearly a kilometer across, with dozens of droids floating to and fro as they carried loads of ice and crystal debris, slowly uncovered the ancient, pockmarked, red and black stone of the ruins, scanned the area for artifacts, or slowly drilled deeper and deeper into Arkania's crust. The Great Sith Library was ancient - far older than Arca Jeth's Praxeum, or most Jedi and Sith ruins in the galaxy - and had been destroyed so long ago that the chance of finding usable artifacts was slim. Yet the Force still drew me here, an aura of power not even the greatest user of Force Light in the Old Republic had managed to fully dispel, and even the tiny fraction of a Lucrehulk's complement of droids repurposed for the dig was an order of magnitude larger than any other archaeological expedition this place had ever seen. If there was something to be found here, we would find it...

...if interference from third parties didn't make it all blow up in our faces.

The woman waiting for us in the dig site was tall - taller than my bodyguard's a hundred and eighty-two centimeters. She was still of average height for a pure-blooded Arkanian and I felt a flicker of satisfaction at the knowledge that I would eventually surpass her, growing up. Long, straight, silver hair fell over her shoulders as they framed a pale face most humans would call classically beautiful, if not for a thin, old scar across her right cheek and eyes milky white and pupilless as a frozen corpse's. She wore a simple pale grey robe, a faded yellow short-cloak, brown leather boots, and a leather armguard over her right arm. Her head and both hands were uncovered, her robes lacked any thermal lining, and there was little evidence of thermoregulating tech on her person. In short, she was dressed totally inappropriately for the extreme cold and snow of Arkania. Not to mention her lack of weaponry, aside from what looked like an elaborate walking stick. All in all, she clashed with her surroundings almost as much as my bodyguard in her skintight catsuit did.

"Are you in charge of this... archaeological expedition?" she asked in a no-nonsense tone in lieu of a greeting as we approached. There was a pulse of... not quite open hostility or anger, but the more neutral danger from her. The same sort of danger one felt standing in the tracks of a high-speed train, and of about the same magnitude; don't stand in my way, or else.

"And what if we are?" I challenged. I'd never taken being threatened well; I always felt like smashing the threat, or running away so I could build something to blow the threat up. Such urges hadn't amounted to much in my previous life beyond a love of war games and theoretical weapons discussions, but both my new body and the Force had changed things. Interlopers wouldn't be tolerated.

"Then in the name of the Jedi Council and by the will of the Force I, Serifa Alturen, Jedi Watchman of Arkania, order you to cease and desist."

Well, crap.