Star Wars - Lost Tribe of the Sith 06 - Sentinel

The only artifact of Jelph’s alien origin.
    Well, not the only one
, she thought, extinguishing the lightsaber.
    That’s where he was now, she knew. As usual, he had risen at dawn to trap breakfast and gather their fruit for later. While offering nothing like the gardening conditions in the lowlands, the jungle provided other means of sustenance year-round; in this latitude, she doubted she would notice when winter came. He spent the rest of his day building their shelter, before retiring, at dusk, as he always did, to keep vigil beside the device—the one part of his space vessel he hadn’t brought down to the farm. She walked there now, to the spot in the trees where Jelph sat on a stump for hours, staring at the dark metal case and fiddling with its instruments.
    He hadn’t kept it from her. For the Sith, the “transmitter,” as he called it, could be as explosive a discovery as the starfighter. Jelph had kept it for what it represented: his lifeline to the outside. He’d never been able to get a message out; as he explained it, something about Kesh and its shifting magnetic field prevented such attempts. That might not be a permanent situation, but it could be centuries before it changed. Ori wondered if that same phenomenon had thwarted the castaways centuries before. All he was able to do was set the device to scan for signals from the ether, recording them for later playback. Perhaps, if some traveler came near enough, he might be able to get a message to the beyond. She now understood his trips upriver in earlier months: he came to the jungle to see what sounds he’d snared.
    Normally, he heard nothing but static. But whatever Jelph had just heard had thrown him.
    “I can’t go back,” he said, looking blankly at the device.
    Ori looked at the flashing thing, not understanding. “What happened?”
    “I caught a signal.” It took him several moments to be able to say the words. “The Jedi are at war with one another.”
    “What?”
    “A Jedi named Revan,” he said. “When I lived there, Revan was like us—trying to rally the Jedi against a great enemy.” Jelph swallowed, finding his mouth dry. “From the sound of it, something’s gone wrong. The Jedi Order has split. It’s at war with itself.”
    Jelph replayed the recorded message for her. A fragment of a warning from a Republic admiral, it cautioned listeners that no Jedi could be trusted. The ages-old compact between Republic and Jedi had been sundered. Now there was only war.
    The message ended.
    Shaken, Jelph deactivated the device. “This … is
our
fault. The Covenant.”
    “The Jedi sect you belonged to?”
    “Yes.” He looked up in the twilight, unable to find any evening stars through the foliage. “And that’s the trouble. There aren’t supposed to
be
any Jedi sects. The Order is divided now—but we divided it first.” He shook his head. “May the Force help them all.”
    He turned his gaze to the wilderness again. Ori let him sit in silence. It occurred to her that during all her days of complaining about the world she had lost, Jelph was living with the loss of a whole galaxy. And he was losing it again now.
    At last, he stood and spoke. “I don’t know what to do, Ori. We kept the Tribe from discovering a way off Kesh. But I always held out hope that with the transmitter, I could make contact one day. Make contact,”he said, looking back at her for a moment, “to get us out of this place.”
    “And to warn them about my people,” Ori said.
    Jelph looked away. There was no avoiding the truth. “Yes.”
    Ori touched his shoulder. “It’s only fair. I tried to warn my people about you.”
    “Well, it’s pointless now,” he said, stooping to lift a stone from their future front garden. “If the Jedi are divided—or, worse, if Revan or someone else has fallen to the dark side—then bringing a planetful of Sith to their attention is the worst thing I could possibly do for the galaxy.”
    “You don’t know that,” she said. “You could be wrong. The Jedi could still come here and wipe everyone out.”
    “Yes, I could be wrong.” Laughing to himself, he looked at her. “You know, that’s the first time anyone’s heard me say that. Maybe if I’d said it more often back home, I wouldn’t be here now.” He tossed the stone into the stream and knelt again. “I’ve lived my whole life thinking I knew what I was supposed to do. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do
now.
”
    Watching him,