Chapter Thirty Five

While Harry was apprenticed to Master Fay, the other students of Clan Saa had to go through the normal Jedi Temple education for a time. For most part this was easy for most of them despite the suspicious looks of their fellows. Master T'ra Saa had run a very tight ship after all. Over the years since their arrival they had proven themselves as well as the efficacy and, thanks to Masters Yoda, Saa, and the others, the pedigree of their new techniques. On top of this, and despite the attack on the Temple by the Yinchorri, it was a relatively simple, peaceful time for them all.

Yet if there is such a thing as Potter luck, then Potter luck splashes. When Lady Luck, or the Unifying Force whichever its local name was, goes looking for a chew toy, it routinely chooses either someone with the Potter name or people associated with them for any length of time.

Alecto had never heard Mistress Lily calling Harry's bad luck the Potter Luck. But right now if he'd heard that concept, he would have agreed with it immediately. Not even a padawan a month and already things have gone wrong! The Duros padawan thought as he raced through the corridors of the giant mining complex on Ephelion 6.

He and his Master Sul Ni Thun were here to oversee diplomatic talks to try and broker a peace agreement between the locals and a major corporation, Heavy Metals, which owned the rights to the planet. The planet in question was Ephelion 6, a massive super-dense planet. Almost but not quite a gas giant in size and atmospheric density, it had incredibly large deposits of duralium, alusteel, several of the key minerals needed to create Duraplast, and even more valuable hollinium.

However the conditions on the planet's surface made mining an incredibly expensive undertaking. Building machinery that could withstand the wind, pressure and heat was so expensive it could have soaked up the total GDP of many a planet outside the Core. It had cost so much, and even within the mining complex conditions were so harsh, that Heavy Metals simply couldn't afford to use specially built droids for the job and still make a profit from the complex.

Instead they had hired sentient miners. Yet the conditions they had to work with, and the fact the company had to transport them, plus the companies need to recoup its initial investment had made said company come up with myriad hidden ways to indenture the miners. The low pay, the poor conditions and the fact they weren't guaranteed any pay unless the survived the full two years of their contract allowed the company to treat them more like slaves at times, which, Alecto had discovered, quite a few of them were.

But miners were a fractious lot at the best of times, and most had never taken to the companies games quietly. This resulted in several bloody conflicts in the past fifteen years since the complex had been built. The miners had been oppressed severely several times, their rights as Republic citizens ignored at the whims of Heavy Metals at times. Even when they had won some of those conflicts, the local sector government came down on the side of Heavy Metals, sending in troops to quell the miners, or outright extirpate them, allowing the company to bring in more. After it had recouped its losses in the first ten years of operation Heavy Metals saw no need to change the way it went about its business.

That state of affairs might have continued except that an ex-republic soldier, a veteran of the Kal Huro Unrest signed up for a stint here. Silas Oznic swiftly organized the miners and when the time was right lead them in a swift and effective campaign against their on-planet overseers capturing many of them, a starship, and the shipment the ship was ready to take off-planet with. Said mass of metals was worth several billion credits in value, setting aside the even larger, by an order of magnitude, the price of the actual mining complex. With that done, they had two weeks before the next ship arrived, which they used to fortify the entire mining complex as best they could. The ten km wide and fifteen km longmining complex was now a fort of immense strength. It could be wiped out by orbital bombardment of course but taking it intact would be the next best thing to impossible so long as the miners remained united.

But of course the miners, all 22,000 of them, couldn't last for long. They had rations for six months, but they had no hydroponics section so no way of growing their own food, which of course had been another stick Heavy Metals had used to beat the miners down. The miners however had sent the one ship they had captured directly to Coruscant, demanding their plight be heard by the Senate. If they weren't, they would wait out the six months then blow the complex to kingdom come.

While the Senate dithered and did nothing, the Jedi Order sent in Master Thun and Alecto to make certain that the peace talks that the miners had demanded would occur. Heavy Metals was reluctant to talk, but given the cost of replacing the station, and the PR fallout from the miners on Coruscant, they had to agree.

Yet Master Thun had sensed deception from the HM reps almost immediately, and had tried to press them into admitting they had something else planned. It hadn't worked however, and about two hours after arriving in the mining complex, the 'talks', more argument than actual discourse, the first explosion occurred. This had been immediately followed by a comlink demand that HM give in to the miner's demands or else the whole complex would be destroyed immediately.

Talks had of course stopped, and even with Mater Thun insisting he felt no deception in Silas the HM's local manager tried to break off the talks. Master Thun hadn't let them, insisting on questioning them both about their involvement, which he could as a Jedi. A Jedi's word could be admitted into a court of law as evidence given sufficient cause.

That left it to Alecto to find the bombs going by what the locals could tell them of the most dangerous places, coupled with how far someone could have moved in the time since the HM's ship had entered the docking bay. Four dead miners had also helped point the way.

Alecto skidded to a halt, looking around quickly, then at the scanner in his hand for a moment before choosing a direction down a large corridor dominated by a series of heavy pipes to either side of him. Using the Force to sense anything out of place coupled with a feeling of danger, Alecto quickly found the bomb, placed next to a large gas intake valve. If it had blown, it might have opened up the entire hub he was currently in to the planet's atmosphere.

Using skills Alecto had been taught as a perspective Sentinel he was able to find the proper way to open it, and then to disarm the bomb but as he did Alecto frowned. "This is a rather crude bomb. It would have made a loud bang and flash, but could it cause enough damage to penetrate the gas intake?" He murmured aloud, giving voice to his thoughts in a way that his master would have disapproved of.

After a moment he reached out to the Force to find his master. Something was going on here, and the HM's duplicity in it had to be brought to the surface before it could boil over. At the same time, he tried to sense any danger from any specific area through the Force, not having much luck. Then he found a mind like his own, not in that it was that of a Force sensitive, but that of another Duros. But I didn't think there were any Duros here… As that thought struck Alecto, so too did a sense of danger flash through him from his master, coming through strongly thanks to the master-padawan link.