Star Wars - Lost Tribe of the Sith 06 - Sentinel

Ori saw the look she’d seen in him in her previous visits to the farm. It was the expression he’d worn when toiling in the muck. Then he had been doing something unpleasant, but he’d been doing it because he had to do it, to keep his garden alive and his customers happy. His duty.
    Duty
. The term didn’t mean the same thing to the Sith. In the Sabers, Ori had had missions she was charged to perform—but she had taken them on as personal challenges, not out of some loyalty to a higher order. The galaxy didn’t have the right to give her odd jobs. Truly free beings had lives.
Slaves
had duties.
    And now Jelph was suffering, certain that he had
some
duty to perform, but unsure what it was. What service did he owe the galaxy—a galaxy that had already cast him out?
    “Maybe,” Ori said, “maybe Sith philosophy has the answer for you.”
    “What?”
    “We’re taught to be self-centered. We don’t think
us
and
them
. It’s just
you
, versus everyone else. No one else matters.” Placing her arms around him from behind, she looked out at the dark stream, burbling quietly past on its way to feed the Marisota River. “The Sith cast me out. The Jedi cast you out. Maybe neither side deserves our help.”
    “The only side worth saving,” he said, turning toward her, “is ours?”
    She smiled up at him. Yes, she had been right from the beginning. He was so much more than a slave. “Give it a try, Jedi,” she said. “If I can do something selfless—then maybe it’s time for
you
to do something selfish.”
    He looked at her for a long moment, a twinkle in his eye. Wordlessly, he broke the embrace and stepped over to the receiver. Uprooting it, he grinned at her. “Shall we?”
    Ori watched him cradle the blinking machine for a moment before she realized what he intended. Exhaling, she stepped over and helped him carry the transmitter to the side of the stream. With one great heave, they tossed it in. Striking a shoal beneath the current, the contraption splintered noisily into shards. They watched together for a moment as bits of casing bobbed and vanished into the darkness. Then they turned back toward their house.
    The cords were cut.
    It was time to live.

Read on for an excerpt from

Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Conviction
by Aaron Allston

Published by Del Rey Books
    Coruscant, Jedi Temple
Infirmary Level
    The medical readout board on the carbonite pod flickered, then went dark, announcing that the young man just being thawed from suspended animation—Valin Horn, Jedi Knight—was dead.
    Master Cilghal, preeminent physician of the Jedi Order, felt a jolt of alarm ripple through the Force. It was not her own alarm. The emotion was the natural reaction of all those gathered to see Valin and his sister Jysella rescued from an unfair, unwarranted sentence imposed not by a court of justice but by Galactic Alliance Chief of State Daala herself. Had they come to see these Jedi Knights freed and instead become witnesses to a tragedy?
    But what Cilghal
didn’t
feel in the Force was the winking out of a life. Valin was still there, a diminished but intact presence in the Force.
    She waved at the assembly, a calming motion. “Be still.” She did not need to exert herself through the Force. Most of those present were Jedi Masters and Jedi Knights who respected her authority. Not one of them was easily panicked, not even the little girl beside Han and Leia.
    Standing between Valin’s and Jysella’s gurneys with her assistant Tekli, Cilghal concentrated on the young man lying to her right. His body still gleamed with a trace of dark fluid: all that remained of the melted carbonite that had imprisoned him. He was as still as the dead. Cilghal pressed her huge, webbed hand against his throat to check his pulse. She found it, shallow but steady.
    The readout board flickered again and the lights came up in all their colors, strong, the pulse monitor flickering with Valin’s heartbeat, the encephaloscan beginning to jitter with its measurements of Valin’s brain activity.
    Tekli, a Chadra-Fan, her diminutive size and glossy fur coat giving her the aspect of a plush toy instead of an experienced Jedi Knight and a physician, spun away from Valin’s gurney and toward the one beside it. On it lay Jysella Horn, slight of build, also gleaming a bit with unevaporated carbonite residue. Tekli put one palm against Jysella’s forehead and pressed the fingers of her other hand across Jysella’s wrist.
    Cilghal