Star Wars - Kenobi

points, scattered randomly around the yard. A couple smoked still, where blasterfire had flash-fused the sand into lightning glass. His posse had left those, not the Tuskens. Orrin had never known Plug-eye to use blasters on the way in.
    Plug-eye. This raid could have been the work of no other. No other Tusken in this part of the Jundland Wastes would dare attack at dawn. No one had ever caught more than half a glance of Plug-eye and lived to describe it. If they’d lived, Orrin always said, then they didn’t meet Plug-eye, but some other Tusken, with a more amiable disposition. Descriptions of the notorious raider varied. Skinny or fat? Male or female? Short and stubby, or a Wookiee in a robe?
    The tales had only two things in common. Plug-eye was fierce as fire—and where other Sand People had metal turrets for their eyeholes, something must have happened to one of the warrior’s eyes. Rather than simply removing the eyepiece, Plug-eye had jammed a crimson stone into the opening.
    Or something. The stories didn’t even agree on which eye it was. This time, though, things might be different. They’d arrived quickly enough to save some witnesses.
    Orrin had already been dressed and in the fields for an hour when the call—or more correctly, the Call —came. That fact, and his work team’s proximity, had saved the Bezzard family from a horrific end. But what had come before was tragic enough. Two of Orrin’s neighbors—cousins, on his ex-wife’s side of the family—exited the back door of the house, carrying the body of the Bith farmhand. Orrin looked down as they passed. The posse would handle the burial—just as, over the dune to the east, more volunteers were burning the dead Tuskens. They had to make this as easy for the Bezzards as possible.
    He’d lived through it before. When his youngest had died, just as senselessly.
    Orrin heard motion in the house. “Mullen, you in there?” he asked.
    “Yep.”
    Orrin’s older son—he couldn’t bring himself to think of him as the only son, yet—sauntered from the building, holding two halves of a blaster rifle. “Looks like Plug-eye was here,” Mullen said.
    “Figured.”
    Inscrutable behind his black goggles, Mullen Gault could have been a clone of his father at twenty-five—if the younger man weren’t trying so hard to look like someone else. Both were tall and powerfully built, with the ruddy skin of farmers born and raised. There the similarities ended. Blue-eyed Orrin’s hair was dark and elegantly graying. He tried to look nice even on the range; you never knew who might happen by. Mullen, meanwhile, had woken in his clothes from the previous night’s carousing. That was typical. He’d sacrificed several teeth years earlier to a tangle with a gambler in Anchorhead—and he’d lost another in the same town just recently.
    People said that was why Mullen frowned as often as his father smiled, but Orrin knew that wasn’t so. The boy had been scowling in the crèche.
    Orrin took the rifle pieces. Most Tuskens wouldn’t leave anything that might be useful. Plug-eye seemed pickier. “How many were there?”
    Mullen picked at his beard and stood against the doorway, scratching his back against the jamb. “Three Tuskens dead in the yard. Then those that took off into the hills. Veeka just called—she lost ’em up at the Roiya Rift.” From under bushy eyebrows, Mullen looked keenly at his father. “I figured you’d want me to call off the hunt. They’re on their way back.”
    Orrin snorted. “Well, don’t miss ol’ Pluggy too much. Next time breakfast rolls around—”
    He stopped. A woman’s anguished sobs echoed through the house. “Is she all right?”
    “She’s out front with the old man,” Mullen said. “She’s pretty shook up.”
    “Imagine so.” Orrin looked up. “Who’s with her now?”
    “I said. The old man.”
    Orrin gawked. “The dead old man?” He threw the fragments to the ground. “I told you to make sure someone was with her, Mullen. And you thought I meant her dead father ?”
    Mullen simply stared.
    “Mullen, I swear!” Orrin grimaced and jabbed two fingers at the bridge of his son’s goggles, clonking his son’s head against the door. “Really.”
    The young man said nothing as his father marched back to the landspeeder. Finding his twill half-cape behind the passenger seat, Orrin draped it over his shoulders and turned to face the house. This isn’t going to be easy.
    The sight of