TUESDAY, JANUARY 14, 2414
		 HAUSER-02C1 (JISATSU), HAUSER SECTOR
			OUTER RIM TERRITORIES

	I made my way through the spaceport city of Danuu with all my
senses alert for trouble.  Actually, it's fair to say that I always try
to be alert for trouble, but normally that's more of a subconscious
thing; right then, though, I was consciously tuned in to the danger
frequency.
	It wasn't hard to tune into.  In Danuu it hums in the
background like the antimatter throb of a starship's warp engines.
I'm not a squeamish woman - freelance spacers can't afford to be
squeamish - but all the same, I knew I'd be glad when my current
customer took delivery of his shipment and I could get the hell off
this planet.
	Jisatsu had been a Japanese colony once, one of that Earth
nation's farthest-flung colonies from the homeworld; only Ishiyama was
a greater distance from Earth.  Unlike Ishiyama, Jisatsu had
maintained close contact with home base; unlike Ishiyama, Jisatsu had
thus not escaped megacorporate domination.  The shattered ecosystem,
teetering social structure, rampant corporate-government corruption
and endemic crime and violence were the results.  Where Ishiyama's
cities had a unique charm all their own, and its culture was like a
modern high-tech throwback to Meiji-era Japan, Jisatsu was a tangled
wreck of corporate strife, alien hustlers, and gang warfare - a
typical Outer Rim port city, but with the intensity jacked all the way
to the right.
	Even its name is menacing.  On the Galactic Survey charts,
it's just Hauser-02C1, planet 02C1 in the Hauser Sector.  "Jisatsu" is
Japanese for "suicide", and not the honorable kind, either.  It may
not be official, but it's appropriate.  Anyone who runs away to
Jisatsu finds out soon enough that she was better off wherever she
came from.
	So I was alert, but trying not to be ostentatious about it,
moving through the teeming streets with a calm awareness of everything
around me.  I was dressed to avoid attracting attention, in a sturdy
spacer's coverall and boots with a shapeless cape thrown over them, my
long dark hair braided back and hidden by the hood of the cape, my
eyes shadowed behind mirrored flashglasses.  Flash-suppressing optics
are useful for so many things: not only do they they protect your
eyes, they eliminate the need to avoid eye contact on the street by
making it impossible in the first place.
	A few of the more perceptive members of the throng I moved
through realized that I wasn't quite what I seemed.  I could feel
their reactions as their own predatory senses, hyper-alert to anything
out of the ordinary run of the street, registered my own zanshin
awareness.  They could tell that I wasn't a victim.  Most of them
probably took me for a bounty hunter.  None of them bothered to
confront me; none of them were hotheads looking to prove anything.
	That suited me just fine.
	I was on my way to rendezvous with my customer at one of
Danuu's more legitimate (read: less degenerate) eating-and-drinking
establishments.  Unfortunately, the shortest route from the spaceport
complex to the restaurant led through this particularly grungy section
of town.  While looking over the sputtering, half-functional map
terminal at the spaceport, I'd decided that it would be less risky
overall to plunge straight through the heart of darkness rather than
spend twice the time skirting it through areas more than half as
dangerous.
	I spotted the girl several seconds before I consciously
registered her: a pale, rather waifish creature in black rags under an
oversized black army cloak, with a tousle of blue-silver hair,
shivering in the mouth of an alley a half-block ahead.  It was the
hair, I think, that caught my attention, but she was too young.  She
could have been anywhere from a precocious twelve to a late-blooming
sixteen.
	Two men in bottle-green suits, too clean and nicely cut for
their owners to belong to the street, stood near her, one at right
angles, the other - the one doing the talking - in front of her.  Gold
glittered on the talking man's thick fingers as he made an emphatic
gesture.  The girl shook her head; the man repeated the gesture more
vehemently as his companion put a hand on the girl's shoulder.  She
flinched, tried to pull away, then winced as his grip tightened.
	I bit the inside of my cheek even as I gave a sad shake of my
head.  It was a scene all too common in the port cities of the Outer
Rim; runaway kids of all species, running away from gods know what,
into the arms of an "industry" that has to be worse than what most of
them are fleeing.  They turn up on gray-market vids of all
description, on port-city street corners, eventually on the tables of
port-city body banks, whatever organs that might have escaped the
ravages of disease and drugs cut out of what was left of them and sold
to some other sucker.
	When I was that age I was lucky, and I had I an uncontrolled
talent that kicked in whenever I was really threatened, though I had
hated to use it.  The odds had obviously never been in my favor - but
now that I was out of danger, I was left with the depressing thought
that I couldn't save everybody.
	There were days when the bigger problems swallowed all of the
smaller ones - Anthy had told me about her brother's effective death
through overwork, and though I desperately wanted to save every kid I
saw on the street... there was only me here.
	The bigger man gave the fair girl another shove, and my heart
caught in my throat.  I was forcibly reminded of any number of similar
situations I'd barely escaped during my two year stay out here before
the Experts had found me - but she wasn't having any of my luck at
escaping.  Ignoring the pale-haired girl's protestations, the two men
in green herded her into the alley.
	I bit my lip.  It would fix one life... 
	... Screw it.  I'm here, aren't I?
	I broke into a run, elbowing my way through the crowd,
projecting a sense of urgency intense enough that most of the scum
around me didn't need any more encouraging to get out of my way.  It's
a useful trick I learned from my kenjutsu sensei - using the low-level
telepathy I was genetically blessed (or cursed, depending on your
point of view) with to generate this non-directional field of feeling.
That trick has the perk of being nearly invisible to other teeps in
the crowd; if there were any, it wasn't likely they would realize that
I was consciously creating the effect.
	I broke free of the throng, skidded on wet trash in the mouth
of the alley and put a hand against filthy brick to keep myself
upright.  They were gone, already down one of the branching alleys.  I
closed my eyes, steadied my breathing, concentrated.  Center first, or
-you'll- be the one getting hurt, I told myself wryly.  There's no
need to get all overwrought about it and make some kind of damnfool
mistake that gets you both killed.
	I found the bright spark of the girl's fear and followed it,
my gait now a tight, controlled jog, into the alley and down a fork to
the left, the sphere of my awareness ready for anything that might
impinge upon it from any direction.  Just as I was about to turn
another corner, my hands reaching under my cloak for my blade, I was
almost bowled over by a sudden hot wash of rage and terror, stunning
in its unexpected intensity.  It was over almost as soon as it began,
with two bright peaks of fear and pain, then nothing but a quiet
undercurrent of dark satisfaction.
	Heart sinking as I realized what that pattern of forces must
have represented, I turned the corner, prepared to avenge if not
prevent.
	The girl in black noticed me without looking and turned,
flowing like an ink stain across the pool of yellow light cast by the
single feeble lamp set over one building's rear exit.  Her face was
thrown into a stark, black-and-white relief by the glow of a hard blue
bar of light shining from a metal cylinder she held in her right hand.
Her eyes glittered across the ten feet or so separating her from me,
brilliant blood red and glowing with exultation.
	I stopped short, gasping.  What I'd taken for a surge of
resistance from the girl, resulting in her offhanded murder by the men
in green, had been... this?
	With a whisper of cloth and a sputtering hiss, the blue light
was sucked back into its source and disappeared, leaving me blinking
at the sudden dark.  When my eyes readjusted, the girl in black was
still there.  The fierce joy was gone from her red eyes now; she
simply stood, feet apart, watching me watch her, her face so blank I
wondered if I had been imagining that joy.  At her feet lay the
smoking remains of the two men in green suits.  The air in the alley
was thick with the -presence- of her, cool and unruffled, centered,
calm, deadly.
	I remembered the last time I saw that lethal confidence, and
once again it had belonged to a woman with blue-white hair.  Something
inside me made a small noise at the recollection; I filed it away for
later.
	"Anta wa dare?" the pale girl asked, her voice soft and flat.
Japanese, not the local accent.  Who are you?
	I returned my half-drawn sword to its place, took my hands out
of my cloak, and made a formal bow.  I wasn't sure who this girl was,
but it was obvious that she was a martial artist of some kind, and she
was -good-.  And that light - I'd seen its like before, and I knew
that its wielders deserved respect.
	"Anne Cross," I said, "of the Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu."
	The girl in black returned my bow.  Smiling faintly, she
replied, "I am Rei Ayanami, of the Ancient and Obtenebrated Order of
the Sith."
	My pulse jumped again, and I quelled the spurt of excitement
fast (and the crooked smile I felt tugging at my lips).
	"I know of your order," I said, leaving out the fact that what
I knew of it was not anything particularly -good-.  (Obtenebrated?!)
	Rei nodded, acknowledging the facts both spoken and unspoken.
Then she tilted her head, a faintly inquisitive look crossing her face.
	"You came to help me," she said.
	I nodded.  "Your camouflage was excellent," I told her.  "I
didn't know you were anything but what you seemed."
	"I never thought anyone in -this- city would try to help,"
said Rei with a hint of ruefulness.  She kicked at one of the dead men
lightly with a square-toed boot.  "They aren't the ones I was looking
for anyway," she went on.
	My brows knitted as something touched my awareness; I tensed
as danger approached from somewhere beyond Rei.  A figure melted out
of the darkness of the alley behind her: another, larger man in a
green suit, raising a blaster, his face a mask of rage.  I was already
in motion, my sword in my hands.  I opened my mouth to sound a
warning, but Rei had already felt him - I could see it in her eyes.
Why, then, did she not react?
	A shadow separated from the rest of the shadows further down
the alley, a shadow with two glowing red eyes - and suddenly the
darkness and quiet of the alley were split by a volley of heavy
blasterfire, almost deafening in the confined space.  The short but
furious volley cut the man down where he stood; taken from behind, he
never had any idea what hit him.
	This sudden violence stunned me more than the eradication of
the first two men, because I'd felt -nothing-, had no inkling at all
that the shadow had been there.  I still felt nothing of its presence,
except for the evidence of my eyes.  As it approached, it loomed over
Rei, a spindly, attenuated humanoid figure perhaps two meters high.
Humanoid but not possibly human; it was barrel-chested but oddly
proportioned, its limbs much too thin.
	Then it stepped into the light, which glinted only a little
from its matte-black armor, and I understood.
	"A battle droid," I murmured, understanding now why I hadn't
felt its presence.
	"Of a sort," Rei replied.
	"Objection: Battle droids are simplistic machines lacking both
elegance and initiative," the droid replied in a surprisingly
human-sounding voice.
	"Well, you clearly don't lack for initiative," I observed.
	The droid spun the two heavy blaster pistols it held around
its trigger fingers, then holstered them.
	"Droid efficiency at its best," it - he, with that voice I had
to think of it as a "he" - replied in a tone of great self-satisfaction.
"Request: Permit me to introduce myself.  My designation is HK-47.  I
am a full-service translator, culinary artist, and personal security
droid."
	"Uh... huh.  Interesting combination of functions," I said.
	"Statement: The master finds me very useful."
	"I bet she does."  I turned to Rei.  "Can I ask you
something?" I wondered.
	"Yes," Rei replied.
	"What are you doing here?"
	Rei considered the question for a moment, then replied,
"Later."
	Without waiting for a response, she turned and moved off down
the alley, disappearing.
	I thought about protesting, but then her droid handed me a
card with a cordial gesture before turning and walking off after her.
	Puzzled, I looked at the card.  It contained an address on the
other side of town and a time several hours in the future.
	Boy, I mused to myself, tucking the card into a pocket of my
flightsuit.  I don't know about power-mad and evil, but Sith Knights
sure are a -brusque- bunch.
	I stood looking after the strange twosome for a moment, then
resettled my cloak, turned around, and made my way to the rendezvous,
feeling curiously oppressed and lonesome.


   /*  Big Country  "Your Spirit to Me"  _Driving to Damascus_  */


		     Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
			       presents

			      Anne Cross

			     Rei Ayanami

		UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES FUTURE IMPERFECT
		    -=WARRIORS OF THE OUTER RIM=-

				BLADES

			      featuring
			        Ru-ah
				HK-47
				 and
			       Archie
			     as himself

			 Benjamin D. Hutchins
			   with Anne Cross

		(c) 2004 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited


	I considered not going to the rendezvous with the girl in
black.  After meeting my contact, swapping the pickup information for
his shipment for my payment, and making it back to my dropshuttle at
the spaceport without further incident, I considered just boosting
back to the orbital dockyard and the Autumn Heart, locking down the
shuttle and getting the hell away from Jisatsu.  Danuu's palpable
atmosphere of sleaze was making me feel increasingly unclean, and the
cramped, metallic, utilitarian quarters aboard the old Orion-class
dropshuttle didn't help.  I wanted to be back aboard the Heart,
walking barefoot on the grass and feeling like I was outdoors.  There
was nothing stopping me from filing a flight plan and going...
	... but something about the girl who said she was a Sith
Knight made me curious.  For a while, lying in my bunk on the
dropshuttle with an arm draped over my eyes, I tried to analyze my own
motivations.
	They weren't all that hard to analyze.  The girl reminded me
of Ifurita; there was no getting around that.  Had Ifurita ever been a
child, she would have been something like the girl named Rei, except
for her eyes - and if you discounted the color difference, there was a
similarity there, too.  They both knew they were dangerous, not like
other people.
	The difference was that Rei seemed to enjoy it.
	I sighed.  Who was I trying to kid?  Everybody reminded me of
Ifurita in some way or another.  That's what being in love is about
sometimes.
	"I miss you, love," I whispered softly.
	Then I keyed the commset built into the little instrument
panel above my head and hailed my ship.
	"Go ahead, Anne," the voice of Ru-ah came back.  In a sense,
Ru-ah and the Autumn Heart are the same thing.
	"Ru-ah, I'm going back into Danuu," I told her.  "I met
someone when I was on my way to the meet, and I have to do some
followup."
	"A problem?"  Ru-ah's voice was tinged with concern.
	"I don't think so," I replied speculatively, "but it might
turn into one.  If you don't get an uplink from me in two hours,
call... "  I thought for a moment, then finished, "Call the Jedi
Temple on Naboo."
	"Kaitlyn-sensei's brother?" Ru-ah replied, her tone puzzled.
	"Right," I replied.  "Tell him I've crossed paths with someone
who claims to be a Sith Knight, and I might be in trouble.  But only
if you don't get a link from me.  OK?"
	"A Sith - "  She cut herself off, and then she sighed.  "I
understand, I guess.  Be careful."
	"I'll never be anything but, on -this- planet," I replied
ruefully.  "Talk to you soon, Ru-ah.  Out."
	I thumbed the connection closed, thought for a moment, then
got up and left the shuttle again.

	The address on the card the droid had given me turned out to
be a cheap motel on the outskirts, one level up from the coffin stacks
that dotted run-down spaceport cities on human colonies all over known
space.  I made my way through the lobby, trying not to think about the
individual components that made up the place's rich and variegated
stench, my zanshin filling the space around me.
	Two drunken Gran (though the thought is uncomfortably racist,
I sometimes wonder if there's any other kind) got into a bidding war
over the prospective price of two hours with me - never mind that I
wasn't selling - and as I walked away down the main corridor I could
hear it escalate into a fistfight.  It almost made me smile.
	The door to room 124 opened just as I reached it, and there
was that droid again.  Funny, I thought it was black; here under good
light, its armor was a dull orange color.
	"Announcement: Your guest is here, Master," HK-47 said.
	The girl called Rei was sitting in a samurai's modified seiza
on the center of the room's single narrow bed, one foot forward, ready
to spring up at the first sign of danger.  She was naked but for plain
white underclothes, her cloak and rags sprawled on the desk in the
corner, but the gleaming silver cylinder of her lightsaber lay close
at hand, ready to be snatched up in an instant should she need it.  As
I entered, Rei's eyes were closed.  She seemed asleep, but I knew
better.
	Her red eyes opened as the droid closed the door behind me.
She nodded a greeting.
	"I'm sorry," I said, bowing.  "I didn't mean to disturb your
meditation."
	"I've finished," Rei replied, picking up her lightsaber,
rising smoothly to her feet and stepping off the end of the bed.  I
was struck then by how small she was.  She'd looked small on the
street, bundled in those rags and that cloak, shivering with feigned
apprehension, but stripped of all that she was even smaller, short and
very slender.  Fragile-looking.  It was an illusion made more
convincing by the porcelain whiteness of her skin and the delicate,
elfin lines of her face, and had I not seen the hardness in those red
eyes, the feral grace in the way she had moved over those two dead
men, I might have been taken in by it.
	I stood silent as Rei dressed, not in the rags but in garb
that I recognized as the traveling clothes of a Jedi Knight.  Black
monsuke-like tunic and trousers, those same sturdy square-toed boots,
a white inner robe for contrast, and a wide black leather belt - very
familiar, save for the colors.
	Clothed again, Rei turned to me.  "You asked why I'm here,"
she said, "but that isn't really what you want to know."
	I smiled, shrugged.  "One has to start somewhere," I said.
	Rei got back up on the bed and sat down at the head end,
looking thoughtful.  After a moment, I climbed up and sat down
opposite her at the foot end, taking my katana from my belt and laying
it alongside me as she had with her lightsaber, and listened.
	"This planet is the hub of a ring of slavers," Rei told me
flatly.
	I shrugged.  "It's the Outer Rim," I said grimly.  "That's
unfortunately nothing special."
	"Correction: This one is," HK-47 put in.
	"He's right," Rei replied.  "This isn't Hutts dealing in
Twi'lek dancers, or forced labor in Chiizatsu duotronics factories, or
Elasi drug runners.  It's different."  She fixed me with those crimson
eyes and said, "They deal in special interests.  Human children, with
sidelines into a few of the closest humanoid species, gathered mostly
from former Japanese colonies on the Rim."
	I didn't think I liked where this was going, but I had to ask
anyway.  "What... for?"
	"Anything the customer wants," Rei replied, her voice
unnervingly calm.  "Sex.  Biomedical experimentation.  Religious
brainwashing.  Special abilities."
	"Special abilities?"
	"Piloting aptitudes.  Force sensitivity.  Telepathy."
	I rocked a little on the last one; it struck a little too
close to home.
	"Where do you come in?" I wondered.
	She looked speculatively at me for a moment, then shook her
head.  "Not yet.  First I want -you- to tell -me- something."
	"What?"
	"Why did you want to help me?"
	I looked at her with my eyes and peeked out from behind my
mental shields, trying to get a read on her.  Not a surface scan - my
TP rating is only P3, I'm not strong enough to do that even if I
wanted to - but some sense of what she was feeling.  I got nothing
back but a cool undertone, mental static.  She either knew I was
reading her, or she was just very cautious.  I remembered the way
she'd feigned fear in that alley, so effectively that it was all I
could track her by.
	She gazed back at me, patient.
	Without thinking further about it, I told her: "You remind me of
someone I love."
	She absorbed that without any apparent reaction; then her eyes
slowly closed and opened again.
	"So," she said.
	We looked at each other in silence for a moment.
	"I had a friend," she said.  "A latent telepath.  He
disappeared six months ago on Ushitora.  I went looking for him and
found... this."  She spread her hands.  "I'm still trying to find the
core.  The people responsible.  I know they're on this planet, but I
don't know where."
	Rei looked out the window at the ugly dead-video light of the
city's nightglow.  "I thought to find my way into their system through
the feeder loop - be taken by their street sweepers as a likely
candidate - but there's too much small-scale vice on this planet.
I'll spend all my time killing unconnected local operators like those
three men tonight."  She gave a little, exasperated sigh, the first
real show of emotion I'd seen from her.  "I have to re-think my
strategy," she admitted, turning to face me again.
	Before I could respond, HK-47 interrupted.
	"Reminder: It's time for dinner, master," he said.
	Rei smiled a little.  "All right, HK-47," she said, standing
and stepping lightly off the end of the bed.
	I felt my crooked grin tugging at my mouth again.  "Your droid
reminds you of mealtimes?"
	"HK-47 worries if I don't eat regularly," she replied,
shrugging into her black overcloak.  "He thinks I'm too thin."
	"Statement: Organic meatbags require regular nourishment to
maintain what passes for their optimum efficiency," said HK-47
didactically.
	I raised an eyebrow.  "'Organic meatbags'?"
	Rei shrugged.  "I'm not sure where he picked that up," she
said.  "It's hard-coded into his programming."  Her lightsaber
disappeared somewhere under all that dark fabric.  "You can come along
if you want," she said.
	I wondered if it was only curiosity that led me to follow her.
We went out the back, into another of Danuu's innumerable identical
alleys.  HK-47's restless optics scanned the alley automatically.
	"Query: Are you going to eat the local food again, master?" he
asked.  With a trace of plaintiveness in his synthetic voice, he went
on, "I do wish you had selected temporary headquarters with a kitchen.
I hate to think what the local meatbags' cooking is doing to your
delicate fuel systems."
	"I'm fine, HK-47," Rei said, with the quiet resignation of
someone who has had this conversation many times.  "Watch mode."
	HK-47 stopped just short of sighing as he responded with a
hint of a grumble, "Acknowledgement."
	He scanned the alley once more, side to side, then look up.
His armored skin turned a deep matte black so suddenly that, for a
moment, it was as though he had disappeared.  Then, without a sound,
he jumped straight up, vanishing into the night.
	I looked a question at Rei.  "He'll be nearby," she said.
	"Ah," I said, doing my best to look like I saw that kind of
thing every day.
	We walked through the streets of Danuu.  I admired the way Rei
glided through the crowd.  I made my way with decent grace, avoiding
the oblivious types and gaining a bit of ground from the more
perceptive ones with the no-nonsense read they got from me, but Rei
passed through as though the rest of them weren't even there.  They
parted around her like a river around a rock.  In the three blocks
from the motel to the restaurant she picked, she was never bumped or
jostled, never had to sidestep, never got the glare from a youngblood
with an agenda.  She was going where she was going, and everybody else
had better just get out of the way.
	We sat in the back booth of a surprisingly clean shyamata, and
I was in a contemplative enough mood to wonder how it was that the
middle-aged Salusian proprietor had found himself running a noodle
shop on this godsforsaken rock, and what he thought about it.  I
wasn't feeling contemplative enough to ask, though.  We ordered and
ate in silence.  It's hard to have a conversation when you're sucking
up wide, flat noodles from a hot metal pan with the aid of a utensil
that looks disturbingly like an oil filter wrench, anyway.
	After the pans were cleared away and the traditional
after-dinner cups of trokai arrived, Rei looked at me over the rim of
her cup for a moment.  I was still keeping my almost-subconscious
watch on her, psionically, watching to be sure I didn't make a
misstep.  (She wasn't what I'd expected a Sith Knight to be, but I'd
heard enough about them that I certainly didn't want to annoy one.)  I
could feel her gathering her thoughts; then she looked away, busying
herself with a sip of trokai.
	I didn't push.
	We finished up, paid and left the shop.  Not knowing what else
to do, I kept following Rei.  As I walked along behind her, I
concentrated on making my promised link with Ru-ah.
	The intricately carved wooden ornament that enclosed the top
of my braid quivered softly, nestled against the base of my skull, and
Ru-ah's consciousness brushed mine.
	[All clear?] she asked.
	<So far.  I'll check in again in two hours,> I replied, and
broke the link.
	I felt the subtle wrongness at about the same time Rei did;
the slight pause in my step coincided almost exactly with hers.  It
was only for a fraction of a second; then she continued on, not
looking back.  At the next alley, she broke smoothly away from the
crowd on the sidewalk and went in.  It wasn't where we had come from.
I followed, wary.
	This alley was a bit wider than most; the building on our left
had a loading dock, which accounted for that.  It didn't look like
anything had been loaded or unloaded at that dock for quite some
time.  Too much garbage piled up in front of it for a truck to get in
there now, anyway.
	They appeared almost as silently as HK-47, but we both felt
them coming.  I turned to face the way we had come, watching them
dropping down from the fire escapes and entering from the street.  My
back touched Rei's, the span of her shoulders a few inches below mine.
The reaction was smooth, instinctive, and right in a way I can't
really describe.  We knew they were coming and we were ready for them - 
together.  It was just that simple.
	I was looking at sixteen black man-shapes, but really
humanoid, nothing like HK-47.  Each had one glowing red optic, but
they were offset: monocular battle visors.  Each had a weapon in his
right hand.  As they advanced, a dull hum filled the alley,
overshadowing the sputtering buzz of the fluorescent light above the
abandoned loading dock.  Vibroblades.  Considerate of them.  That much
gunfire or blaster fire would bring the police, even in this town.
	One of them came in from the right, but I was already moving.
Kurenaikaze, my katana, glided out of its saya like oil over glass.  I
half-knelt under the humming arc of a vibroblade and came up beyond
it, driving the strike with my legs and hips more than my arms.  There
was a solid sliding impact, and I knew without looking that that one
wouldn't be a factor any more.  I scratched him off my mental list and
kept moving.  There's an Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu kata that goes rather
like that battle, though it has a more picturesque and poetic name
than "Sixteen Thugs in a Filthy Alley".  As I flowed with the rhythm
of the fight, I could almost hear Kaitlyn-sensei chanting the count.
Ichi, ni, san, shi...
	... juuroku.
	I turned, blade lowered but ready, to see how Rei was making
out.
	For a moment I couldn't see her; another wave of them had
flowed into that end of the battlefield from one of the converging
alleys and encircled her.  I started toward them, but suddenly the hum
of her lightsaber was joined by what sounded like the snapping hiss of
a second saber igniting, and they all sprang back.  She came into view
with her robes snapping around her, just finishing a spin.  She held
the twin to the lightsaber I'd seen earlier in her left hand, the two
blades lighting the circle she'd just drawn around herself like a pair
of torches.
	That gleaming light was back in her eyes again as she feinted
first one way, then another, driving the blacksuited men back by turns
as they sought to approach her from one angle or another.  The sheer
confidence in her sliding steps as she moved dared them to try her;
she was the master of this tableau and everybody knew it.  To
interfere would have been an insult to her.  I swept Kurenaikaze
clean, sheathed it, and leaned up against a wall to watch the rest of
the show.
	One of them did try her, singly, from behind.  Without
looking, she reversed the blade in her right hand and drove it back,
punching a hole in her own cloak and coring out her attacker's heart.
When she pulled it free, turning the movement of her arm into a turn
of her entire body, she did a very strange thing: keeping the
right-hand saber reversed, she brought its butt together with the butt
of the one in her left hand.  There was a sharp click as they locked
together.
	A moment passed, elongated by my own fascination.
	Then Rei Ayanami exploded into motion, her attack pattern
shifting from sword to staff technique in the space of a heartbeat,
and the men in black died.
	She finished up on one knee, saber-staff extended to either
side, as though offering it to me.  She looked up, a bead of sweat
dripping from the end of her nose, and met my eyes.
	What else could I do?  I stood up and bowed deep, one warrior
to another.  She rose, separated the sabers, and made them disappear
with a sweep of her arms, then put her hands together and saluted me
in turn.
	She surveyed what remained of my own opponents and nodded in
satisfaction.
	"You really -are- of the Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu," she said.
	"You really -are- a Knight of the Sith," I replied.
	She smiled.  So did I.

	"Change of plans," Rei said as we merged back into the stream
of foot traffic on the main drag.  "No point in going back to the
motel; they'll have it staked out.  Do you have anywhere we can go?"
	I smiled.  "Somewhere they'll never reach us," I told her.
"How will you let HK-47 know where we're headed?"
	"He'll know."
	"By the way, where was he during all of that?"
	"Watching," Rei replied.  "We didn't need him."
	I supposed I couldn't argue with that.

	I smiled to myself as the lift stopped, partly in anticipation
of being back in my favorite place and partly because visitors'
reactions to the Autumn Heart's living deck, after the grungy utility
of the hangar deck, is always a pleasure to watch.
	The Autumn Heart's living deck is one large open space, about
a third of a mile square, built to be a very convincing imitation of a
nice patch of Jyurai.  Most of it is grassy land criscrossed with
footpaths.  There's a ridge running through the middle with a pond to
one side.  The sky is part holographic projection and part clever
light-manipulation, with the light from Jisatsu's sun standing in for
Jyurai's.  When there's no sun close enough to stand in, the system
improvises.  The walls are mocked up to seem like thirty-foot cliffs.
If you climbed to the top you'd find the projection equipment for the
holographic sky.
	The lift is located at the center of what the false sun's
movements shows is the south wall (it's actually aft), its metal doors
hidden from outside view by a shallow cave.  One of the footpaths
leads to the cave; others go to the captain's quarters (a cottage on
the far side of the pond), the little cluster of guest houses to the
east, the grove, the pond and the dojo, which stands opposite the
guest houses on the west side of the pond.
	The doors opened and sunlight glowed from the mouth of the
cave.  I stepped out and beckoned to my guests.
	Rei emerged into the light, and I got my first really good
look at her.  You can stare at a person for hours under the yellowish
artificial light of a nighttime city like Danuu and never really know
what she looks like, but sunlight, even filtered through the Autumn
Heart's environmental control system, reveals the truth.
	Her skin was white, not just pale but -white-.  Her eyes, seen
in natural light, were an even more startling shade of crimson than
I'd expected, bright and clear, like fresh blood viewed through a
diamond.  Her hair was just the color I thought it would be, and it
wasn't an affectation.  As the light breeze blowing through the
compartment ruffled it, I could see all the way to the roots.
	She looked around at the cavernous space, the azure
holographic sky, the breeze-blown grass, the pond, and all, and a
smile came to her face.  Not her mouth - her whole face.  It's hard to
describe.  The corners of her mouth moved no further than they had for
her ironic little grin in that blood-soaked alley on Jisatsu, but
everything about this smile was -different-.  It was a bright, sharp,
washed-clean kind of smile, as though she were seeing something dear
that she hadn't seen for a long time.
	If she'd been hunting the dealers in special children through
cesspools like Danuu for six months, she probably hadn't.
	HK-47 didn't look any different.  He also didn't look
impressed, but then, his faceplate had no expressions.  It was
permanently sculpted in a sort of slant-eyed gas-mask glower.
	Rei turned to me.  "It's wonderful," she said.
	"Thank you," I said.  I knelt down and unlaced my right boot.
"Would you mind taking off your shoes?  The grass doesn't like them."
	She took hers off without comment, putting them neatly next to
each other in the little shoehouse standing next to the cave mouth.  I
put mine next to hers.
	"This way," I said, leading her across the meadow toward the
guest quarters across the way.  Halfway there, I wondered if HK-47's
feet were going to harm the grass, so I let myself drop back a bit and
watched him walk.  I shouldn't have worried.  His tread was so sure
and careful he was hardly bending the blades; he didn't even leave
footprints.  I wondered yet again what he was.  I'd never seen a droid
like him.
	I showed Rei one of the guest cottages and told her to make
herself comfortable while I went to the bridge and took care of some
business.
	She nodded and asked, "Is there somewhere I can take a bath?"
	I pointed toward the back.  "Oh, sure.  There's a tub and
shower in there, towels, robes, all that."
	"Do you let clean people swim in your pond?"
	There's a question I don't get asked very often.
	"Uh... sure, as long as you don't mind sharing it with the
fish," I said.
	"I don't mind."
	"Well, then, enjoy.  I'll be back in about half an hour."
	She nodded, thanked me again.  I went across the meadow, past
the pond, to the cottage that made up my own quarters.  There, I
washed my face, hung up my cloak, and switched swords.  I don't
usually carry Kurenaikaze aboard ship; although the living deck is
spacious (big enough to put a small town in), some of the ship's more
businesslike spaces are too small for a katana.  I hung Kurenaikaze in
its place above my bed, took down its companion Kurenaishio, and put
that through my belt instead.  Then I went back to the lift and down
to the bridge.
	Ru-ah was waiting for me there.  Well, technically, Ru-ah's
-always- there; she's the tree growing out of the bridge floor at the
center of the room.  She has a humanoid persona she projects when
dealing with people, though.  In that form, she's a woman of about
my age, neither slender nor stocky, with cafe-au-lait skin and auburn
hair like glowing embers.  She has deep dark green eyes and a fondness
for jumpsuits that match them, and no need for pockets, since she's a
hologram.
	She was standing next to the captain's chair, a pensive look
on her face.  I took Kurenaishio out of my belt, stood it in the
little slot for it next to the seat, sat down and asked, "What's the
matter?"
	"I'm not sure bringing that girl aboard was a good idea," she
said.  "When you told me who she was, I did some research.  If she's
what she says she is, she's dangerous."
	I laughed.  "Ru-ah, I -know- she's dangerous.  An hour ago she
killed somewhere between fifteen and twenty battle cyborgs."
	"That's not what I mean.  We know what the Sith were.  If she's
really one of them, she's... well, -evil-."
	I shook my head.  "I guess we don't know everything we think
we know about the Sith," I said, "because there's no way that girl is
evil."
	"I'm not so sure," Ru-ah said skeptically.
	"I am," I replied flatly.  We stared at each other for a
moment, and I watched her realize that this was going to be one of the
Jyuraian cultural assumptions I was not going to buy into.
	This time, she had the grace to realize that I wasn't planning
to discuss it further, and rather than pushing, which she does
occasionally and which is annoying, or sulking, which would have been
worse, she changed topics.
	"Fine.  What's this about twenty battle cyborgs in an alley?"
	I told her about the fight, and then what Rei had told me
about her quest.  We'd discussed the attack on the way up and
concluded that it was probably a -good- thing.  Just by being in town
and looking around, we'd made somebody nervous enough to reveal to us
that we were on the right track.  Without it we might have gone on
floundering about for some time.  Now we had something to focus on.
	Ru-ah took that in without comment, then said, "Where do you
come in?"
	"Telepaths, Ru-ah.  Do I have to spell it for you?"  She
looked hurt; I sighed.  "I'm sorry, Ru-ah.  I guess I'm still a little
touchy from the last thing, and still a little wound up from the
fight.  I don't mean to take it out on you.  But these... people...
are dealing in unawakened or newly-awakened telepaths like some people
deal in black-market audiovisual equipment.  I may not be with the
Experts of Justice, but I can't just ignore that."  I touched the grip
of Kurenaishio at my side.  "I'm a samurai.  I'm an Ash Knight.  I'm
supposed to protect the weak."
	"I thought samurai were supposed to protect their overlords,"
Ru-ah said with a mischievous grin.  We've had this conversation
before, but she always pretends it's the first time we've ever
discussed it.
	And like always, I played along.  "Gryphon-sensei says the
Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu's overlord is justice.  He's the O-sensei;
what he says goes."
	"So he's the boss of you, then, O hard-ass space warrior?
This guy that you see, what, twice a year, he's the boss of you?"
	"No," I replied, "he's not the boss of me.  He's the boss of
Kaitlyn-sensei, and -she's- the boss of me."
	"And you're the boss of me," Ru-ah said, "so I guess I'd
better quit bitching, right?"
	"Right," I said with a firm nod.
	We always get about that far before we crack up giggling.
	"Anyway," I said when I could talk again, "you're right that I
don't know much about Rei.  Will it make you feel less worried if I -
wait, what time is it in Theed?"
	Ru-ah looked thoughtful, which is her mannerism for when she's
looking something up.  "Oh-nine-fifty-four," she replied.
	"Great.  Can you get me the Jedi Temple on Naboo?  If Len's
not out of bed by now he deserves to be rousted by a phone call.  And
he may know something we don't."
	"Right away," said Ru-ah, sounding happier.  She stepped out
of my field of view, taking up her station to the right of my seat; a
moment later, a six-by-four holofield popped up in the viewer area,
and the face of a girl I didn't recognize filled it.
	"Hello," she said.  "You've reached the Jedi Temple of Naboo.
My name is Eirtae, how can I help you?"
	"Hello," I said.  "I'm Anne Cross.  Is Leonard Hutchins
around?"
	"Master Len is with a student at the moment.  Do you need him
right away, or can I have him call you back?"
	"I'd rather talk to someone now, if it's not too much
trouble."
	She nodded.  "Wait a moment, I'll get him."  The screen
shifted to a "PLEASE WAIT" pattern.  I timed my pulse; assuming I was
at my usual resting rate, it took twenty-four seconds for the face of
Len Hutchins to pop up, slightly flushed and sweaty.
	"Hi, Anne," he said, scrubbing at his thick shag of dusty-red
hair with a towel.  "What's up?"
	"'Master Len'?" I said.
	"I have a Padawan," he said, shrugging.  "Didn't really set
out to find one, but you know how it is."
	I nodded.  "I know.  Who's the girl you've got playing
receptionist for you?"
	"Huh?  Oh, that's Eirtae.  She's actually one of the Queen's
handmaidens.  She answers the phone like that when she's here, out of
habit.  Usually we just say 'hello'."
	"Oh.  Why's she at the Temple?"
	"Attending the Queen, of course," Len replied as though it had
been a stupid question.
	I played along.  "What's the Queen doing at the Temple?"
	"What does one do at a Jedi Temple?" he replied.
	"Sit seiza a lot," I replied.  "Reflect.  Contemplate.
Sweat."
	He grinned at me.  "You see?  You didn't need to ask."
	"Are you telling me the Queen of Naboo is your Padawan?"
	"Well... "  He looked around, as if making sure he was alone,
then leaned closer to the pickup and said, "Listen, I won't lie to
you, but this is a big secret, OK?  If her cabinet ministers and such
find out what she's really doing up here, they'll have a -cow-.  They
think she's just doing conditioning exercises and like that."
	"Well," I said, impressed.  "She'll be one well-protected
royal by the time you're finished."
	He winked.  "By the time she's finished with the training, her
term will have expired.  She's looking at the long term, beyond the
throne.  Anyway, what can I do for you?"
	"Does Rianna Santova have a student?"
	"Uh, no... why do you ask?"
	"In that case, what do you know about a modern revival of the
Order of the Sith?"
	He frowned, but it wasn't a "bad things" frown, at least not
entirely.  "There are three that I know of," he said.  "One's a bunch
of idiots out in the Spinward Marches, beyond the ORTs, who think
they're badasses because they found a copy of the Scrolls of the Seven
Spheres and got a few of the Rites of Darkness to work.  They're
dangerous, because a couple of them have real talent and not one of
them has the faintest idea what they're playing with."
	"Not what I'm looking for," I said.
        He nodded.  "The second one's similar, but they have more of a
handle on things.  Their leader used to be the Federation Senator from
Naboo, Eidun Palpatine."
        "This is the one responsible for the mess on Naboo?  The one I
came and picked up Corwin - and Ifurita - after?"
        "Right," Len said.  "He calls himself Darth Sidious now.
Claims his teachings are on a direct line from one of the last two
Dark Lords of the Santovasku era - Rianna's grandfather, Quevas XIII,
the last Emperor of Santovasku."  He looked rueful.  "You saw me just
after I crossed blades with one of his students a year or so back.  It
still hurts when it rains."
        It was a figure of speech - Len's a Detian, a genetically-
modified immortal, so he can regenerate completely from wounds that
would kill a horse - but given that he'd been in a coma just before I
came to pick up Corwin, I knew how badly he'd gotten hurt.
        I thought about it, shook my head again.  "I don't think I'm
dealing with that either," I said.
	He looked interested.  "The only other one's the real thing,"
he said.  "The Ancient and Obtenebrated Order of the Sith.  Rianna's
part of that, if she's part of any group at all."
	"She has a more legitimate claim than Palpatine?" I wondered.
	"You could say that.  Her mother is Kahm Santova, Quevas
XIII's daughter.  She learned the trade from her father's
contemporary - Darth Vader.  As far as the Order's claim to
legitimacy, well... "  Len scratched at the back of his neck and
grinned.  "There -is- the little matter of it being led by Vader
himself."
	I stared at him and felt Ru-ah tense behind me.  "Vader's
ALIVE?!  He was born three -thousand- years ago, Len!  How the hell'd
he manage that?  He's not Santovasku royalty like Rianna's
mother... ?"
	Len shook his head.  "No, he's human.  He spent most of the
intervening years in hibernation.  Came back during the Civil War and
helped us out against Darth Sidious in the, ahem, aforementioned
incident.  We couldn't have saved Naboo without him."
	"He -helped- you?"
	"Yeah.  It's hard to explain - I'm not sure I really
understand it myself - but he says he's working on an... I guess the
best way to say it is an -evolution- of the Sith philosophy.  Light
and Dark in harmony, something like that.  You'd probably grasp it
better than I can, being a full samurai.  Yin and yang, light can't
exist without darkness to define it - you know, like that.  I dunno, I
have to reach all the way back to my training with Dad for that; my
Jedi training has kind of blurred it for me.
	"Anyway, he's got it together, I'll give him that.  Darkness
is his friend in a way I can't even begin to imagine, but he's stone
cold sane, and his moral compass is on 'green'.  I've trusted him with
my life, and would again.  He stays here off and on, but mostly he
wanders the Rim, righting wrongs, seeking deeper truths, scaring the
bejeezus out of people."
	Something clicked in the back of my head.  "Does he have a
student?"
	"Yeah, he does," Len replied.  "A girl named Rei.  I don't
know her full story - Dad could tell you.  She's tied into one of his
old cases somehow."
	"Is she an albino?"
	"Rei?  Sort of.  She's pale and her hair's kind of silvery-blue, 
but her eyes aren't pink like an albino's, they're red.  -Very- red.
Like blood through a diamond."
	The exact same thought I'd had.  Eerie.
	"Why, have you seen her?" Len asked.
	"She's with me now," I said.  "We're... involved in
something."
	"Something you need backup for?" he asked, his face serious.
	"I don't think so," I replied.  "If it turns out we do, I'll
call."
	"Do that," he replied.  From some guys, I bristle at that kind
of stuff - it's patronizing, protective, girls-shouldn't-be-on-their-
own-they-might-get-hurt stuff.  From Len, it's just an offer from a
Jedi Knight to watch his sister's back.  I'm not really his sister -
not biologically, anyway - but Kaitlyn-sensei is, and she adopted me
when she took me on as her student, and that was that.  Len understands 
about blood - that it counts for something, but not everything.
	"I will," I promised.  "I just wanted to check and see if you
knew who I'd run into.  It's not every day you meet a little girl who
says she's a Sith Knight and handles a lightsaber like she means it."
	Len grinned.  "Rei's no little girl, Anne."
	"What do you mean?" I asked.  "I mean, I know she's mature for
her age, and she can handle herself, but - "
	"Ask her about it," Len said.  "If she answers, congratulate
yourself.  She only tells the story to special people, and she
wouldn't want me telling it for her."
	I nodded.  "OK."
	"Anything else you need?"
	"No, not right now," I said.  "Take care.  Say hello to
everyone for me."
	"I will," he replied.  "When are you coming to see us?  We've
got the Temple almost completely restored.  It looks great, if I do
say so myself."
	"Maybe when we're done here," I said.  "I don't have another
job lined up, so if I don't eat up all my savings handling this, I'll
have some time.  And an original Jedi Temple with Jedi living in it is 
bound to be interesting."
	"Great," said Len.  His grin flickered off again as he said,
"You be careful."
	"You too," I told him.  "You've been in that temple less than
two years, your Padawan must be just getting to the Extremely
Dangerous stage... "
	The grin came back.  Good.  I didn't want to end the call on a
somber note.  "You can say that again," he said.  "Talk to you later."
	"Later," I said, and the call ended.
	I turned to Ru-ah.  "Satisfied?" I asked.
	"For now," she replied thoughtfully.  I could still feel her
concern, but it was much less overpowering than it had been, and like
most people, it takes her a while to get used to a new idea.
	I sat back in my seat and thought for a minute.
	"Ru-ah?" I said.
	"Yes?" she replied, moving back to stand in front of me.
	"Download from Master Key," I said.
	She nodded, closed her dark green eyes.  I closed mine and
concentrated, deepening my breathing, searching my memories of the
fight for the clearest image I could get of one of the cyborg
attackers.
	There.  Right in front of me, his blade back, preparing for a
punch strike, illuminated quite nicely by a flare of light from Rei's
saber striking something behind me.  A half-second later I'd parried
his thrust and taken his arm off at the elbow.
	Perfect.
	The Master Key vibrated softly; I held the image as Ru-ah read
it out.
	When I opened my eyes, it was on a holofield in the viewing
area, life size.
	She looked him over.  "Nasty-looking, isn't he," she observed.
	"Do me a favor," I said, "and run that by JIIS, see what they
make of his gear.  If you can get in touch with Vision, show it to
her, too.  Maybe the Experts of Justice have something on it."
	"I'll get right on it," Ru-ah replied.

	When I got back to the living deck, the "afternoon" shadows
were lenghthening and the breeze picking up in anticipation of
evening.  Rei was in the pond, not swimming, just soaking, near the
big rock in the middle.  She raised a hand out of the water in
greeting as I topped the little knoll near the pond; I waved back, sat
down, and turned my attention to the tableau in front of me.
	HK-47 was standing near the edge of the pond, looking down
at a black and white cat which sat a few feet away from him.  The cat
looked back with unimpressed green eyes.  I watched them for several
minutes; they didn't change positions.
	"They've been that way for twenty minutes," Rei called to me.
"I don't think they know what to make of each other."
	I smiled.  Guardians, sizing each other up, neither planning
to make the first move.
	"It's all right, Archie," I said.  "This is HK-47.  He's
Rei's friend."
	"HK-47," said the cat.  "Rei?"
	"Yes," I said.  "Rei is my friend.  She's the one in the
pond."
	Archie cocked his head, thinking that over.
	"HK-47," he repeated, sounding satisfied.
	HK-47 looked toward the pond; Rei nodded.
	Then I got the latest in today's series of surprises, as HK-47
dropped smoothly to one knee, reached out, and petted Archie's head.
Archie, who plays tough but is really just fishing for attention,
almost immediately rolled over on his back and demanded a tummy-rub.
HK-47 dutifully administered one, with all the same smooth and
unhesitating competence with which he'd gunned a man down earlier in
the day.
	"Query: You're a good miniature organic, aren't you?" he
inquired rhetorically, then answered himself: "Yes you are.  Yes you
are."
	I smiled and let myself fall onto my back, hands behind my
head, looking up at the holographic sky.
	"Nightfall" came, and the false sky over the living deck
slowly darkened to a deep purple.  Stars began to pop out, mimicking
the positions they would have had when seen from Jyurai's capital at
this time of year.  The Jyuraians love their world so much that they
build their ships to make them feel as though they've never left.  I
sometimes tried to imagine what it would feel like to love Orron IV
that much.  I'm a fairly imaginative person, but I never could.
	Rei came up from the pond wrapped in one of the white guest
robes, her hair dripping water onto her shoulders, and sat down a
respectful distance away.  She drew her knees up, folded her arms over
them and rested her chin on her forearms, and looked through the grove
at the purpling mock horizon.  I looked up at the stars and wondered
which ones of them were shining on my friends around the galaxy.
	It had been good to talk to Leonard again.  When this was all
done, I really would have to take him up on his invitation.  I
wondered if he'd realized yet that his Hyelian Jedi partner was ears
over heels in love with him, smiled, figured probably not.  He could
hear a piece of silk fall to a carpeted floor, but the messages Emmy
Kyn'o'bi kept sending him were on a frequency outside his reception
band.  I had to smile, but at the same time it was kind of sad.
	Fortunately, he's immortal and she'll live for at least a
thousand years, so they've got time to work it out.
	I sighed, already seeing where -that- line of thought was
going to lead me.
	"Did you check me out?" Rei asked softly, jolting me out of my
mental rut.  I wondered for a second what exactly she was talking
about, felt my face get hot as I momentarily thought she was talking
about the pond, then felt silly when I realized she was talking about
my call to Leonard.
	"Yes," I replied truthfully.
	"Good," Rei said.
	"Do you want to use my commset to check me out?" I asked.
	"I don't need to check you out," she replied.
	"Why not?"
	"I saw you fight.  Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu, just as you said.
You couldn't have learned that form unless you were the kind of person
I can trust."
	I hitched up on an elbow and looked at her.  "Leonard said you
know his father."
	She nodded.  "He saved me."
	"From what?"
	"My makers," she replied, confusing the hell out of me.  Then,
realizing that she must have done so, she went on calmly, "I'm an
engineered life form.  I was created by a biotechnology company on a
planet called Yamaki.  The company was a front for the terrorist group
called Big Fire.  They had samples of Detian blood and wanted to
reverse engineer Omega-2 - the Forever Virus.  I was... test
equipment.  They made me out of an averaging-together of the two
samples they had, trying to identify the common strings that would
give them Omega-2."
	I swallowed.  I thought the prospect of being experimented on
by the Psi Corps was so damn horrifying?  If this girl was telling me
the truth - and everything I had to judge with told me she was - she'd
been -born- to be experimented on, by people worse than the Corps, if
such a thing is possible.
	"I'm sorry," I said.  "I shouldn't have asked."
	"It's all right," she replied.  "It doesn't hurt me any more,
but I'll stop if it bothers you.  Do you want to know the rest?"
	"I...  Yes.  If you want to tell me, yes."
	She nodded.  "I was defective," she said.  "How old do you
think I am?"
	I averaged out my earlier guesses.  "Fourteen or so."
	She smiled sadly.  "Try thirty-five.  Even that's a bit
inaccurate, since I was decanted in 2381, just as I am now.  The part
of the Detian code that makes me immortal is... stuck.  It's called
Edgerton's Syndrome.  Normal Detians stop aging at whatever age
they're treated with the virus.  Second-and-subsequent-generation
Detians do it when they've hit their full growth, and can age back and
forth within their adult span from there.  But not me.  In a way
you're right - I am fourteen.  I was born fourteen.  Someday, when I
get particularly careless, I'll die fourteen."
	I couldn't think of anything to say.
	"My makers were disappointed," she said.  "They ran their
tests, shook their heads.  I was too expensive to throw away, so they
put me in storage in case they thought of something else to try, and
moved on to Prototype Number One."
	One?  Oh, of course.  Scientists.  They'd start numbering
at...
	... Zero.
	Rei.
	I closed my eyes, teeth clenched.  The rage boiled inside me
at the offhanded, sneering dismissal that must have been in some
terrorist researcher's heart as he gave her that name.  I caught
myself and breathed through my nose, forcing the coiled anger to
unwind.
	"Gryphon came to Yamaki in 2395 and stumbled across Big Fire's
local operations," Rei went on.  "It was the first big case for the
Experts of Justice.  They blew the whole thing open, eradicated Big
Fire's presence on the planet, wrecked all the schemes they had
cooking there... and rescued me.
	"I wasn't much of a person then," she said matter-of-factly.
"All I knew was that I had been made for a purpose and failed in that
purpose.  I was defective equipment.  Prototype Zero.  Less than
nothing.  Gryphon-sensei took me in.  He and his family - Kei, Yuri,
MegaZone, Martin and Eiko Rose - they loved me when I did not even
love myself.  I studied the Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu under him,
alongside his own children.  Leonard was five, Kaitlyn seven.  Do you
know Kaitlyn?"
	I nodded.  "She is my sensei," I said.
	Rei smiled.  "So," she said.  "She taught me something, too.
At half my effective age she was already wiser than I.  One day she
told me that if I stayed, it would be a mistake.  That the way of
Katsujinkenryuu was close to my soul, but there was another path out
there which would match it perfectly, if I only dared to seek it out.
I left after five years to do just that."
	I looked over at her, smiling.  I knew about Kaitlyn-sensei's
out-of-the-blue bursts of wisdom, and about daring to seek the path of
truth and how hard it could be.  How much harder if I had been
surrounded by love instead of indifference and sinister, manipulative
intentions?
	"It took you a long time to find it," I said.  "Leonard told
me that Lord Vader only returned to this life last year."
	She nodded.  "I have been with him fourteen months."
	"You've come far in such a short time.  What you did in that
alley... it was incredible."
	"It looked better than it was," she said, then admitted,
"Those cyborgs were strong, but slow and stupid.  There was no need to
use the second saber, to be so acrobatic about destroying them.  I
was... showing off."
	I shrugged.  "We all like to show off for our friends once in
a while," I said.
	She glanced at me sharply, as though surprised by my choice of
words; then I saw her shoulders relax a little, and that private
little smile came back to her face.  "I suppose we do," she said.
	"Where's your master now?" I wondered.
	"I'm being tested," she replied.  "When Shinji disappeared,
Lord Vader told me that if I could track the evil that had taken him
to its source, master my fear, channel my anger, and destroy them
without being taken by the Dark Side... he will have nothing more to
teach me."
	"... And if you can't... ?" I asked, wondering if I really
wanted to know.
	She gazed at the pond's glassy surface in the starlight and
replied calmly, "I've tracked the evil to Jisatsu; they will not
escape me.  What remain are the fear and the rage.  If I fail to
master my fear, I will merely falter at the wrong moment and die.  If
I am unable to control the hatred and rage I feel for the people who
would do such evil, the Dark Side will overcome me, and I will go
hopelessly, irretrievably mad, becoming a creature of evil myself."
She looked up, her gaze locking with mine.
	"If that happens," she said, "you will kill me."
	I looked back at her, absolutely lost for words.
	"I'm sorry.  I'm disturbing you," she said, and made to get
up.  "I'll go."
	"No, it's all right," I said hastily.  "I was just...shocked.  
Stay if you want to."
	She paused, then sat down again, a little nearer.  She looked
at something nearby and smiled.  I followed the line of her eyes and
saw HK-47, still kneeling in exactly the same position, waiting
patiently as Archie stalked imperiously up one of his arms and down
the other, then back up.  The cat perched on his head, using the
vantage point to get a better look at the territory.  Rei chuckled.
	"I don't know why HK-47 likes animals," she said.
	"I know why Archie likes HK-47," I replied, grinning.  "He's
a sucker for an old-fashioned tummy rub.  Actually, it is a bit odd
that they've hit it off.  Archie doesn't tend to like droids.  They
bother him."
	"HK-47 is a... special droid," Rei said.  "Big Fire had him,
too, in a different wing of the same lab, but I don't think they made
him.  I think they found him somewhere and were studying him, trying
to replicate him.  His armor is a unique alloy and he has self-repair
systems beyond anything I've ever seen in a conventional droid.
Whatever he's made of, the secret died with his makers... whoever they
were."
	I studied the dark shape of the droid, all I could see of him
in the starlight, with the white splashes of Archie's paws and chest
visible above the gleaming scarlet optics, and wondered what was going
on inside that metal skull.  I still got no read on him at all - there
was only Archie over there.  Psychically, everything else was empty
space.  He acted so lifelike, I couldn't quite accept the idea that he
was just a machine.
	"You're a telepath," Rei said, startling me out of my reverie.
	"Uh... yes," I told her.
	She smiled.  "You've been scanning me since we met," she
said.  "I'm not one myself, but the talent creates ripples in the
Force."
	"I'm sorry," I said, feeling my face grow hot again.  "I don't
mean to intrude - hell, I'm not -strong- enough to intrude - I've only
been reading your surface feelings.  I wanted to make certain I
wouldn't say or do something to offend you."
	"It takes quite a lot to offend me," Rei replied serenely.
"More than you can manage, I think, unless it turns out that that
cargo hold we passed through on the way down here has carried slaves."
The smile vanished from her face and her eyes glittered coldly as she
added, "Slavers offend me by definition."
	"Never," I told her, startling myself with my own vehemence.
"Not on my ship."
	She nodded gravely, and we subsided into silence.  She lay
down as well, mimicking my own posture with her hands behind her head,
looking up at the sky.  Minutes passed in silence, save for the
crickets and pond frogs, the breezy sounds of a summer night.
	I was almost asleep when I heard her say, "Is your homeworld
like this?"
	"Hum?  Oh.  No... "  I chuckled wryly.  "Not at all.  I'm from
Orron IV."
	"In the Corporate Sector," Rei said, thoughtful, as though
that explained everything.  Maybe it did.
	"Yes," I said.  "Paved from pole to pole.  The only place you
get anything like this on Orron IV is in the Museum of the Holographic
Arts.  No, this ship came from Jyurai.  This is what Jyurai is like."
	"Hmm."  There was another lengthy pause; then she drew a long
breath, let it out slowly, and said rather dreamily, "I'd like to go
back there someday... but my kind aren't welcome."
	Knowing what I knew about Jyuraian history, I couldn't argue
that.  I wondered what Funaho would think if she knew I'd brought her
aboard.  Probably similar things to what Ru-ah thought.
	I also wondered when Rei'd been there before.
	I wasn't drowsy any more; what she'd said had me thinking of
where I'd come from (I never call Orron IV "home" any more), and that
made me restless.  It was like some reflexive desire to escape, felt
by some buried part of my mind that didn't know I already had.
	"Are you hungry?" I asked.  As I did, it occurred to me that
it had only been three hours since we'd left the shyamata in Danuu.
It felt like so much longer that the realization startled me a little.
	"I could eat," Rei replied.

	We sat at the little table in my captain's cottage, I in my
coverall and Rei back in her black silks.  Archie wandered around
under the table, getting underfoot.  HK-47 stood near the door, erect
and alert, ready for trouble even here, although he did at least pause
in his endless scanning to take approving note of the food I was
providing his mistress.
	I'm not sure Rei was really all that curious, or if she just
sensed that I wanted to talk and wanted to make it easier for me.
Between spoonfuls of fresh gazpacho (very fresh; its constitutents
came from the vegetable garden behind my cottage perhaps an hour
before serving), she asked me point-blank,
	"How does a ronin from Orron IV become the captain of a
Jyuraian ship-of-the-line?"
	I didn't handle the surprise as well as I might have, but at
least I didn't choke.  I looked at her over my glass, gathering my
thoughts back together, and replied,
	"That's good.  Not many people realize she's a warship.  It's
usually a pretty good cover."
	"I've been to Jyurai once," she said.  "I saw the Battle of
Jormundgand.  This is a Ryuuoh-class battleship, isn't it?"
	"Officially, they call her a battlecruiser," I said.  "She's
not quite a ship-of-the-line, but yes, she is a Ryuuoh," I replied.
"Slightly modified - but only slightly.  I... "  I shrugged.  What the
hell.  I was at the Battle of Jormundgand too - Ru-ah and I were right
in the thick of it.  If I closed my eyes sometimes, I could still see
the USS Kasimar dying under my guns.
	"I'm sort of an agent for the Jyuraian Imperial Intelligence
Service.  When I left Orron IV, years ago, I was looking for telepath
safe-havens.  At first it was enough to go to the Rim, but then that
damned Amendment to the Psi Act passed and opened the Territories to
Psi Corps conscription."  I seethed briefly, then controlled myself.
	"I'd had enough time to get my bearings, so I wasn't as badly
off as, say, the children that get grabbed in places like Danuu, but I
was still pretty desperate.  I had a few narrow escapes, but I was
-just- lucky enough and prepared enough to get away.
	"Finally, I ended up on Carida, in a tangle with a
particularly nasty Psi Cop and completely out of options.  But the
gods help those who help themselves, and I guess they figured I'd
proved enough... because they sent me some help.  It turned out there
was a pair of International Police investigators on the planet,
looking into abuses of the Corps' expanded conscription powers.  They
stepped in and got me out of there, spirited me away to New Avalon...
and then to Kaitlyn-sensei."  I paused, went over some of my history
mentally, decided what to leave out, and continued.
	"The summer after I made journeyman, I got out of school a
couple of weeks before everybody else, and Kaitlyn decided it was
probably safe for me to travel alone again.  One of her friends
arranged for me to go to Jyurai for my first holiday alone.  I met one
of the other Ryuuoh captains while I was there, and he mentioned me to
his superiors, and apparently the JIIS liked what they saw because
they decided to make me an offer I would have been nuts to turn down."
	"What's their interest in Jisatsu?" Rei wondered.
	"None," I replied.  "For the most part I'm really what I seem
to be: a freelance spacer, making a living on the Rim.  The retirement
plan's not the greatest, but you can't beat the hours, and I find all
sorts of weird, neat, forgotten lore and knowledge out here.  Jyurai
sends me a mission every now and again, usually an observation or
courier job, but most of the time I work for myself.  I'm part of what
the JIIS like to call their 'strategic reserve'."
	She nodded and fell silent.  There was an awkwardness to this
silence that had been absent from most of the others.  I felt a
hesitant... something... from her, but it was gone almost as soon as I
noticed it.
	After a moment, she put down her spoon, stood up, and bowed.
	"I have to rest," she said.  "Thank you for your hospitality,
and for helping me earlier.  Good night, Captain."
	I watched her go, puzzled by her sudden drop into cool
formality, and a little hurt, too.
	"Was it something I said?" I asked Archie.
	"Dunno," Archie replied.
	I cleared away the dishes and went down to the bridge, feeling
strangely desolate.  It was getting late and I felt alone.  I don't
like that feeling.
	The bridge lights were dimmed for nighttime running when I
entered; Ru-ah brightened them slightly, but didn't appear, sensing my
mood.  I racked Kurenaishio and sat down, looking glumly at the dark
blankness of the display field twenty feet in front of me.
	"Ru-ah," I said.  She appeared in that artful way that she has.
Rather than just popping suddenly into existence, she walks out of one
of the shadowed corners of the control room, as if she'd been there
all along.  With the lights up and no shadows, she comes from behind
the tree.  It's a small thing, but it makes life less jarring.
	"Here," she said, her voice hushed.  The control room under
night-shift lighting has a certain cathedral feel to it, with the
vaulting for the ceiling disappearing into the dark and Ru-ah's tree
spreading out overhead.  It encourages hushed voices and respectful
silences.
	"Did we get anything from JIIS or the IPO?"
	"JIIS drew a blank," she said, "but the IPO came up with a few
things.  It's 18:12 in New Avalon right now, but Inspector Bailey said
he'd be there until 20:00.  Shall I call him?"
	"Please," I replied, sitting back in my chair.  A video pane
opened in the display area, and the usual twiddling stuff from an
interstellar call negotiation flickered across it; then it fizzed with
static that resolved itself into the face of Detective Chief Inspector
Donald Bailey, my main contact in the International Police.
	Inspector Bailey must be around sixty, which isn't that old
nowadays, but since he's spent most of that time pounding the pavement
doing old-fashioned investigations, solving crimes with dogged
determination more than brilliance or special abilities, he looks
every minute of it.  He is tall, and he gangles.  His face is
weathered and lined and looks like it's made of worn leather draped
over the Old Man of New Hampshire.
	I said he solves crimes without special abilities, but that's
not really true, now that I think about it.  His determination -is- a
special ability.  On Carida I saw him subdue a Psi Cop with nothing
more than his fists, a pair of handcuffs, and the relentless iron will
that hides behind his kindly, craggy face.  After seeing that, even
though he wants me to - even though I cherish his friendship, and he
knows it - I can never call him 'Don'.  He'll always be Inspector
Bailey to me.
	"Hullo?" said Bailey; his face brightened when he saw mine on
his own commset's screen.  Behind him, I could see the clutter of his
office at Experts HQ.  "Well, well!  I was wondering if you'd be
getting back to me tonight.  How's life on the Rim?"
	"Nasty, brutish, and short, for the most part," I replied.  I
realized then that I must be in an awful funk if the old familiar face
of Don Bailey couldn't cheer me up.
	He frowned, which pulled his whole long face down and made him
look more comical than upset.  "That bad, is it?  You'll be wanting
your information double-quick, then."
	"I'm sorry, Inspector.  I've just got a lot on my mind
tonight, I guess.  What did you find out?"
	Bailey sat back, lit a cigarette, and tapped a couple of keys
on the console in front of him.  The viewpane divided, a narrowed view
of his office now sharing the space with the image Ru-ah had pulled from
my mind.
	"Your boy's a cybernetic assassin, and a very expensive one,
too," he said.  "100% vat-grown, probably from New Chiba or Chiisai
Hatamoto."  The picture of the assassin grew to fill the whole pane,
which flipped long-axis-up to show it better.  Green indicator arrows
pointed out parts as Bailey named them.  "Thermoptic combat visor,
probably Sendai-Coronis.  Retractable vibro-bayonet, Schlessinger,
most likely.  Subdural nano-armor.  Custom-tailored reflex
enhancements.  Chipware for at least half a dozen martial arts."  The
viewpane returned to its original orientation and went back to showing
me Bailey and his office.
	"It's a configuration we're quite familiar with.  Your friend
in black belongs to Big Fire."
	I blinked.  "Big Fire the terrorist organization?  Ties to the
Mysterons and the Psi Corps puppet government?"
	"That's the one.  There's no mistaking this bloke.  They've
got millions of them.  How many did you see when you took this
picture?"
	"I'm not sure.  We didn't bother to count the bits.
Thirty-one or two."
	Bailey whistled.  "And you're not even scratched.  Lord, girl,
Kate said you were good, but damn me!  Our field teams have the very
devil of a time with these bastards."
	"I only accounted for sixteen," I said.  "The rest were
handled by an... acquaintance I've made out here."
	"'Only' sixteen!  Christ!"  He blew a smoke ring, shook his
head in mock sadness.  "It seems like only yesterday you were crawling
through a garbage chute to get away from one man with a sonic stunner.
They grow up so fast... "
	"Cybernetic assassins aren't in the same league as Psi Cops,"
I told him.  "If I saw a Psi Cop today, I'd probably -still- crawl
through a garbage chute to get away from him."
	He regarded me thoughtfully, then said, "I'm not so sure.  At
any rate, if Big Fire is after you, step carefully, my girl.  They're
nobody to take lightly, and these cyber-goons are only their first
line of attack.  If you get one of the Magnificent Ten on your
case... "  He shrugged.  "I don't need to tell you this.  You're an
expert at stepping carefully, been doing it since before this old man
met you."
	I smiled at him.  "Inspector, that old man is the reason I'm
still around to step, carefully or otherwise.  I always listen to what
he has to say."
	He grinned, which did as many entertaining things to his face
as his frown had done.  "If you find you're stepping in something a
bit too deep, call.  Gryphon's got a new protege who's itching for her
first field assignment, and it wouldn't take too much to persuade him
to send her out."
	"Another samurai?  His student?"
	"No, she's a power agent, just come up to SA7 from Tactical
Division.  You might've met her, she used to be a security officer on
Babylon 6."
	"Ayla Ranzz?" I asked through an involuntary yawn.
	"That's the one."
	I nodded.  "I've run into her a couple of times at B6.  She
finally jumped out of the uniformed divisions, huh?  I was wondering
when she'd get around to it.  It'd be nice to see her again, but I
hope it won't be necessary this time out."  Another yawn.  "I'm sorry,
Inspector, but I'm about worn out.  It's been a long day."
	He smiled.  "Good night, Anne.  Sleep well."
	"Good night, Inspector Bailey."
	The signoff screen faded away into blackness as the projection
system shut down.
	I yawned once more, retrieved my blade and headed for the
lift.  "Good night, Ru-ah."
	"Good night, Anne."

	When I got back to my cottage, I felt a certain masochistic
enjoyment in forcing myself to put my coverall in the hamper properly
instead of just tossing it vaguely toward the corner where the hamper
was.  I was still feeling childishly proud of myself for that feat
when I turned and saw the armored, red-eyed shape next to my bed.
	In half a second I was fifteen feet from it, Kurenaishio's
saya clattering to the floor next to me as I presented the blade; half
a second later I realized what it was.
	"HK-47!" I burst out, almost slumping from relief.  "What
the hell are you doing here?" I went on crankily as I retrieved the
saya and sheathed my blade.  "Shouldn't you be lurking around the
guest quarters watching over your mistress?"
	"Statement: The master instructed me to secure your quarters,"
HK-47 replied.  "Although I don't know what sort of trouble she expects 
there to be in a place like this.  It's almost depressingly pastoral."
	I stared at him for a few seconds, then realized he wasn't
going to move unless I kicked him, and maybe not even then.  He'd been
told to watch over me tonight, and that was what he was going to do.
	Whatever.  I was too tired to argue about it.  I climbed into
bed.  If Rei wanted her droid to protect me from the mysterious demons
that inhabited my dining nook, that was his problem.
	It wasn't until just as I was dropping off that it occurred to
me why Rei might have sent him.  It might be a peace offering for her
rudeness, letting me know that it wasn't me that was bothering her by
sending her guardian to guard me in the night instead of her, purely
symbolic though the gesture was in a place like this.
	"HK-47," Archie announced as he jumped up onto the bed.
	"I saw," I murmured blearily, looping out an arm to snuggle
him in.  "Shut up and go to sleep, Archie."
	"OK," said Archie.  Good old Archie.  At least I always
understand why -he- does what he does.

	When I woke up the next morning, with a cool breeze blowing
through my cottage and bright sunlight pouring through the windows, it
was hard for me to believe I'd been so melancholy the night before.  I
ran my mind back over the last half-hour or so of the previous day,
wondering if the light of day would give any of it a clearer meaning.
	In a few moments, I decided it did.
	After my morning bath, I got dressed.
	HK-47 was still in the doorway, still vigilant against the
unknown forces evil to be found in the kitchen area.  When he heard me
approaching the door he turned.
	"Greeting: Good morning, Captain Cross.  I trust you slept
well."
	"Very well, thank you, HK-47," I replied.
	"Statement: My assignment is now complete.  Unless you would
like me to prepare breakfast?  I am programmed with knowledge of a
wide variety of cuisines and can also adapt improvisationally based on
ingredient availability."  He leaned a little closer and added
confidentially, "Expansion: I can do some very nice things indeed with
bantha.  I once defeated Iron Chef Morimoto with that ingredient."
	I blinked.  I must have missed that episode.
	"Well, you won't find any bantha, but if you want to give
breakfast a try, the kitchen's that way."
	"Statement: Oh, very good, Captain.  Just leave everything to
me."
	I'd never seen a droid bustle before.
	"Weird robot," Archie commented from his sunbeam on the
windowsill next to the door.
	"Come on, Archie," I said, gesturing to him as I went outside. 
He jumped down and followed with a great show of reluctance.
	I found Rei in the dojo, which stands by itself near the west
side of the pond.  She'd taken a staff out of the rack of weapons that
dominated the long wall and was performing kata with it.  I leaned
against the doorframe and watched in silence, arms folded, listening
to her tightly controlled breathing and the slap and shuffle of her
bare feet against the polished oak floor.
	The kata she was doing were complicated, advanced ones.  As I
watched I realized that they were mock combats against a single
opponent, an imaginary adversary armed with a sword.  I'd done
something like their opposite numbers, mock sword battles against an
imaginary foe wielding a staff or naginata, too many times not to
recognize them.
	She must have known I was watching, but she gave no sign of
it, continuing until she'd finished.  Then she turned, bowed, and said
softly,
	"Good morning."
	"Morning," I said, rather than what I really wanted to say,
which was something along the lines of, "What the hell's the matter
with you?  Why did you go all cold on me last night?"
	She went and put the staff back into the rack.
	"Staff exercises, huh?" I said, walking into the dojo.
	She nodded.  "I was sloppy yesterday.  If my opponent had been
someone knowledgeable instead of those puppets, I would have been in
trouble.  I hope you don't mind."
	"Not at all.  In fact, if you like, I'd be willing to spar
with you."
	She gave me another one of those speculative looks, then
glanced away.
	"I've imposed on you too much as it is," she said.  "Thank you
again for your help yesterday, and your hospitality last night.  If
you could please take HK-47 and me back down to Danuu, I - "
	"Rei," I said, interrupting her.  She stopped, looked back at
me.  "Did I do something to offend you?"
	A touch of color came to her pale cheeks.  "No," she said.
"Not at all.  It's not you... it's me."
	I frowned.  "I don't understand."
	"I've been stupid," she replied.  "I involved you in my test
without thinking of the possible consequences for you.  I'm setting
dangerous forces in motion, and now my enemy knows your face and
connects it with the trouble I'm causing.  I've placed you in danger
through my own thoughtlessness.  I'm sorry."
	"For a Force user, you're being more than a little
unobservant," I told her. "Maybe this wasn't my fight to begin with,
but if my presence isn't going to interfere with your test, then I'm
-making- it my fight."
	She gave me a puzzled look.  "Why?"
	"Because I believe in what you're doing.  Because I hate
psi-talent exploitation.  Because I have an obligation to help the
weak and oppressed.  Because any way I can buck the damn Psi Corps is
a personal victory for me.  Or because I -like- you, damn it.  Pick
any one you like."
	Rei actually -blushed- at that, which was quite a sight through
her colorless skin.  Then she said, in a tone even more hushed than
usual, "It seems a strange thing, to risk your life out of regard for
someone you've just met and barely know."
	I grinned at her.  "Then pick one of the other reasons."  I
sobered, then, and added seriously, "Besides, I have to stick around.
If you fail, I have to kill you, remember?  I know a foretelling when
I hear one."
	She looked me in the eye, startled; then she smiled her quiet
smile.
	"All right," she said, and her voice was stronger.  "You're
certain you want to go through with this?"
	I nodded.  "I don't want to interfere with your test.  Tell me
when to stand back and I'll stand back - but you'll have to give me a
better reason than 'it's not your fight,' because now it is."
	"Fine.  I won't ask again," she said.
	"Good," I said, grinning.  I took my swords out of my obi, sat
down in front of the weapons rack, and got the cleaning supplies out
of the bottom drawer.  Rei sat opposite me, watching with interest as
I drew Kurenaikaze, set the scabbard aside and started cleaning and
oiling the blade.
	"That's a beautiful sword," she said.
	"Thanks."  I'm a sucker for compliments about my swords.
"They're not old - Kurenaikaze was made for me just a few years ago,
when Kaitlyn-sensei said I was ready to handle things on my own, and
Kurenaishio was made to match later."
	"I've never seen one like it before."  She pointed to the
blade, its steel streaked with the random dark-light interplay of
elaborate multilayering.  "Is it Damascus steel?"
	"More or less.  It's made the same way, but the only person
who knows for sure what's in the alloy is the guy who made it, and he
won't tell anyone until he chooses a successor."  I smiled at the
memory.  "That won't be for a while.  Dannen Ironbridge is too set in
his ways to retire, let alone die."
	Rei drew out one of her lightsabers to contemplate it.  "I
made mine myself," she said.  "Every Jedi does, dark or bright - it's
part of the training.  Another of the tests... if you press the switch
and your hand doesn't blow off, you passed."  She tucked it away
again, then looked back at Kurenaikaze.  "May I?" she asked.
	I don't hand over my swords lightly.  Rei must have known
that; she was cut from the same cloth.  This, then, was another
gesture, her way of reaching out when that strong reserve of hers
wouldn't let her do it openly - trying to make something out of the
odd connection we felt.  I stood, reversed the sword and thrust the
grip toward her as she stood also.
	She took it gently, regarding the carved silver dragon's head
that made up the pommel.  Its ruby eyes winked back at her as she
turned the sword upright and took it in both hands, working her
fingers into a firmer grip around the scaly-patterned metal of the
handle.
	Kaitlyn had considered it odd that Ironbridge had made
all-metal weapons for someone as attuned to nature as I am - two
swords gleaming in silver from tip to pommel without a scrap of wood,
hide or cordage, their scabbards formed from burnished light-grade
durasteel rather than the traditional wood.
	I had thought so too, until I took hold of Kurenaikaze for the
first time and felt the sword's tremendous rightness; then the stubby,
grizzled Asgardian dwarf's brilliance made itself known to me, and I
had no further doubt.
	Rei's face took on that slight but striking smile of hers, and
she turned, holding Kurenaikaze before her in a mid-level en garde.
She stood still for a moment, then rocked back and lunged, pivoted,
and entered a kata which was recognizably the Seven Sons of Akiji
Tashiko, but with a slight alienness to it.  It was like hearing a
beloved poem read by someone with a faint foreign accent.
	She completed the kata, turned, and handed back Kurenaikaze
the same way I'd given it to her; then she put her hands together and
bowed.
	"Thank you.  It is a wonderful weapon."
	I returned the bow to acknowledge the compliment, replaced the
sword, and we both sat down as I started work on the shorter blade.
	"So," I said as I worked.  "I got some information last night
after dinner that may help us plan our next move."
	Rei looked interested.  "Oh?"
	"Those cybernetic assassins who came after us last night
belonged to Big Fire."
	Her crimson eyes narrowed.  "Big Fire," she murmured, barely
audible.  Then, louder, "How sure are you?"
	"Sure enough.  The information comes from the Experts of
Justice.  If anybody ought to know Big Fire, it's them."
	Rei nodded; she knew the IPO's reliability on the subject as
well as I did.
	"I understand why Big Fire would be trolling the Outer Rim for
special talents," she mused, "but why would they then sell them to
third parties?  Their goal is galactic domination, not profit."
	I shrugged.  "It must take a lot of money to operate a
criminal enterprise the size of Big Fire.  Each of those cyborg we
wrecked last night had to cost at least a million credits, and if Big
Fire throws them away by the dozen on capture jobs like that one... "
	She looked thoughtful.  "Yes, I suppose you could be right.
They may be keeping the extremely special cases they bring in for
themselves and selling off the rest to some third party - to make
something back from the part of the operation that doesn't benefit
their cause directly."
	"There's certainly a market," I said ruefully.  "With the Psi
Corps fragmented, trying to impose its writ on parts of the Outer Rim
through force of arms, there must be a lot of enterprises, criminal
and otherwise, that would pay a lot for a telepath without any
connection to the Corps.  No chance of a sleeper persona or a
political agenda tied to any of the Corps splinters for a rogue teep
who was never part of the Corps to begin with."
	"So Big Fire gets the exceptionals they're looking for, and
pockets the cash for the ones they didn't want."
	"It makes sense," I said, sheathing Kurenaishio.  "Then what
we're really looking for is the Big Fire operations center on Jisatsu."
	"Looks that way," said Rei.
	"Well, then, I guess we'd better go back down, start kicking
over rocks, and see what crawls out."

Date: 22 Jan 2414 21:45:33 -0900
From: juniper@autumnheart.ft10298.galnet.net
To: kyouichi.saionji@alum.nit.edu.td
Subject: Kicking over rocks...

Dear Sempai,

There are weeks when I feel like there's not enough soap in the world
to get all the grime off me.  Today was a day in one of those weeks.
You know the kind, where you go grubbing about in the muck hoping to
find somebody who might have a clue as to what's producing all the
slime.

In the past five days, we have:
  - busted not one but TWO drug smuggling rings
  - nearly trashed up a rental car in the process of breaking open a
gang of car/flyer thieves (I'm sure Ani-chan would approve, you can
tell him if you think he'll behave ;)
  - determine that the price for my services is higher than anybody on
this planet can afford
  - maimed, rended and incinerated gods know how many small time
thugs, punks, protection racketeers, pimps, ganglords, razorboys,
chippers, drug czars and corrupt cops

Today, for our crowning achievement, we knocked out a small ring of
orbital pirates, of all things.

I'm getting -really- bored with this whole exercise - I suppose the
people of Danuu might thank us (the Cops, I'm sure, think we're
another gang coming through and trashing the place) - it's good
practice for my combat reflexes but it isn't pushing me at all.  And
when we're done, there'll just be another gang to move in and take
over.

Hopefully, the tip-off we got this afternoon from the Pirate Captain
might lead us somewhere useful.  There's supposedly another "big-time,
outside rival gang" who's shipping valuable cargo off-planet tomorrow
night, so we're off to check it out.  (This guy had records going back
eight months about this 'gang' and their behaviour - if he hadn't been
such scum, I would've said he was a good captain.  There aren't many
pirates that thorough about their records.)

I don't know how Utena keeps going all the time with small-time crap
like this always popping up in her way.  Or maybe she just doesn't
notice the little impediments anymore.  Yeesh.

I've got an invitation from Len Hutchins to come visit him after we
finish dealing with all this crap; he's apparently got a Padawan now.
So the next time you and Ani-chan go visit, there'll be somebody he
can spar with who can parry that Big, Scary Weapon of his and be
offended by his temper.  Hope things are going well with his training - 
I haven't had much news from the Inner Sectors lately.

I'm going to go spar with Rei now, and see if we can actually get
something other than adrenaline practice in.

Ja mata,
Juniper

                      THURSDAY, JANUARY 23, 2414

	The next night we slipped through the spaceport's inter-hangar
security.  HK-47 stayed behind - he would have been too obvious.  Even
without him, breaking into the cargo area was a cakewalk.
	I'll say this for lightsabers.  They're hard to build, a lot
more obvious than a drawn blade in the dark, and a lot more dangerous
to their own wielders than steel, but there aren't many doors that can
stand up to them.  We were inside Hangar C-11 before you could say
"Level Two electrolock".
	Unfortunately, what we were looking for wasn't.  Except for
maintenance machinery, an unattended heavy cargo loader, and a lot of
dust, C-11 was empty.
	"So much for that," I said, and just as I said it, something
fizzed across my zanshin, a sinister, sparkling presence that set my
teeth on edge.  Rei felt it too; we turned toward it in the same
instant.
	At the other end of the cavernous room, a man stepped around
the back end of the cargo loader, walked with a slow, measured, almost
insolent tread to the front of it, and stopped.  It took me a major
effort of will to suppress an instinctive urge to blast him with fire,
throw every loose object within sight at his head, and run, in that
order.  Not that he was a particularly threatening-looking man; he
wasn't.  He was tallish, broad-shouldered and strong-looking, and
dressed all in black, but that wasn't cause for panic.
	What made me want to panic was the gleaming golden badge on
his chest.  Even at this distance, unable to see the details, I knew
what it was: the crest of the Psi Corps.  The man in black was a Psi
Cop, a telepathic enforcer, one of the most fanatical and powerful
agents the Corps possessed.
	Since childhood - when they were a legitimate arm of a
legitimate government - I had hated and feared the Corps, and
especially the Psi Cops, beyond all rational thought.  Even now, the
sight of one set me to quivering, gritting my teeth with the effort it
took not to fight or flee instantly.
	"So much, indeed," he said, his voice surprisingly high for a
man of his size, in a pleasantly conversational tone.  "I presume you
were looking for the next shipment?  Well, as you can see, they're not
here.  Your informant got his consonants mixed up."  He smiled and
started walking slowly toward us, then stopped again about thirty feet
away.  He had close-cropped blond hair and a rather bland,
uninteresting face.  A person would walk right past him in a crowd and
not think anything of him, if he weren't wearing that uniform.
	"I believe," said the Psi Cop affably, "you want _G_-11."
	Rei's eyes flicked to the open door behind us; she took a
quick step back, but the Psi Cop smiled at her and made a dismissive
gesture with his right hand.  Behind Rei, the door swung of its own
accord, banging shut and staying that way despite the ruined lock.
	I blinked, fighting down another surge of alarm.  That wasn't
telekinesis he'd used.  I'd have felt something if he'd used a psi
talent... and that meant - 
	"Rei, look out," I said, moving to the man's left.  "He's a
Force user!"
	The Psi Cop smiled again.  I wished he would stop doing that.
"Very good," he said.  "You can tell the difference between the Force
and telekinesis?  Tell me - how do you do that?"
	I gave him a smile of my own.  "TK feels like this," I
replied, and flung my will against him.  The composed calmness of his
face broke for just a moment as the force of my blow shoved him back a
few feet, the soles of his shoes scraping loudly across the dirty
concrete.  A trickle of blood came from his left nostril.  He reached
up and wiped at it with one gloved hand.
	While he was occupied with that, I concentrated on the Master
Key, hoping he wouldn't scan me.
	<Ru-ah.>
	[Yes.]
	<A ship will leave Hangar G-11 in the Jisatsu spaceport soon.
Don't let it leave the system.  It has Big Fire's latest group of
captured children aboard.  Let it get out of the planetary authority
zone and then stop it.  Cripple it if you have to.  And call the
Experts of Justice.>
	[Will do.  Are you in trouble?]
	<Yes, but I can't be two places at once.  Go.>
	[I'm on my way.  Be careful.]
	I broke the connection, relieved.  The Cop hadn't tried a
telepathic probe; he was too busy having a Psi Cop's usual reaction to
a telekinetic.  I could tell that from the covetous glitter in his
flat gray eyes.
	"I see," he mused, his tone still pleasant, as though I'd
only drawn him a helpful diagram rather than attacking him.  "Thank
you.  I found that most informative."
	"Who the hell -are- you?" I demanded.
	"Oh, I'm sorry.  How terribly rude of me.  My name is Roger.
You've already guessed that I'm with the Psi Corps, I'm sure."  He
straightened his slightly rumpled uniform jacket, adjusted his gloves.
	The story of how Saionji-sempai had gotten his lightsaber,
fighting a Dark Jedi Psi Cop named Roger Tremayne, rushed into my
mind.  How could he be alive?  Saionji had all but disemboweled him
and damn near cut his head off!  And here he was.
	That fact and his cold eyes nearly choked me on my own fear
before I got it back under control again.  He smiled nastily at me as
he felt it.
	"And you must be the two young women who I've been told are
trying to ruin the good thing I have going in this area."  He raised
his voice a bit.  "Oh, Asuka dear... "
	Something dropped from the interconnected network of metal
rafters that held up the hangar's roof high above us, landed softly
next to Roger, and then slowly rose to stand beside him.  It was a
girl, about the same apparent age as Rei, dressed in the same hateful
uniform as the man who'd called for her.  She was slender, a bit
taller than Rei, and strong-looking, with a lot of bright-red hair
drawn back into a heavy fall and kept out of her eyes with a red metal
band over the top of her head.  Her eyes were a dark blue, and as she
looked at me, I had the unnerving sensation that they were made of
glass.  They were blank, utterly without expression.  They didn't even
appear to have pupils, just flat expanses of blue nothingness.
	"This charming young lady is Asuka Langley Soryuu," said Roger
conversationally, "one of my network's very first success stories.
Five years ago, when we were just starting up, one of my agents found
her in Neubaeden, on Niogi.  At the time, she had just turned nine
years old.  Her mother was one of those sad telepaths who cannot
accept their gift and struggle against it all their lives.  Rather
than join the Corps, she opted to take the sleepers and live a gray
and pointless existence.  At one point she tried to brighten that
grayness by having herself inseminated by a clinic specializing in
what they call 'bright normals' - screened non-telepaths of unusually
high intellectual capacity.  She hoped her daughter would not be born
with her 'curse', as she called it.
	"Fortunately, -that- plan failed.  When the second round of
compulsory tests came, they showed young Asuka to be possessed of
considerable intellect, yes, but also considerable telepathic
potential.  By then, of course, the Extension to the Psi Act had
passed, and opting out of the Corps was no longer an option for
minors; so the girl was to be taken from her fool of a mother and
inducted."  Roger smiled sardonically.  "The stupid woman was so
deeply touched by this great honor that she terminated herself."
	I clenched Kurenaikaze's grip until my knuckles cracked,
wondering if it was possible to kill a man with nothing but the desire
to see him dead.
	"Asuka here didn't take that very well," Roger went on,
putting a hand on the girl's shoulder in a parody of affection.  She
didn't react at all as he went on, "She ran away from her induct team
and tried to disappear into the Niogan underground.  Fortunately,
she'd been found by the Corps, so my network already knew of her.
Finding her was a simple matter.  I was going to turn her over to the
Corps, but then I realized that there is something very special about
this girl."
	Roger's mocking smile became weirdly, twistedly paternal.
"You see, Asuka has a rare mixture of talents - the same mixture I
myself am blessed with.  She is a telepath, the next level of human
evolution... and she hears the Force.  There are only a few of us; my
own teacher, Palpatine, was one."  At the shocked look on my face, he
looked solicitous.  "Oh, you didn't know the Senator was a telepath?
Ah, I suppose you wouldn't - he was always so vocally against the
Corps on the Senate floor, after all.  Quite an inspired cover,
really.  He was one of our best and brightest.  But now is not the
time to talk of glories faded," he went on, looking a bit sad.
	"At any rate, in Asuka here, I had a golden opportunity: my
first student, my first opportunity to pass on the modest martial art
I've synthesized out of my Psi Corps telepathic combat training and
the ancient Jedi teachings of the late Senator Palpatine.  I was never
sure if Turhan Kai was a viable fighting form or not, since I was the
only person I had ever found who could learn it.  This darling girl
gave me the chance to pass it on and see if it would stand up on its
own."  He smiled broadly.  "I'm pleased to report that the process,
though not without the occasional hitch, has produced complete
success.  Since then I've only found one other person capable of
learning the art, and though he progresses more slowly than dear
Asuka, I'm sure he'll be equally successful in time."
	Then he fixed me with his intense eyes and said, "And now I
have found a third."
	I stared at him as if he were crazy.  OK, he -was- crazy,
but... anyway, I stared at him.
	"You're out of your mind," I told him.  "I'm not Force-sensitive."
	He shook his head.  "Your eyes may not have been opened," he
said, "but if they were, you could see."  He stepped back, giving the
redheaded girl's shoulder one more pat, and then said cheerfully,
"Asuka, my pet?"
	"Yes, Master," Asuka replied, her voice flat, almost mechanical.
	"Do you love me?"
	"Of course I love you, Master," she said, with about as much
passion as a toaster oven announcing that the waffles are done.
	"Deal with these two, then," he said.  "You may kill the Dark
Jedi girl if you like, she's of no use, but I want the other one.
Bring her to me."
	Asuka turned and looked through me with her blank eyes, then
nodded.
	"You will have her, Master," she said, and sprang with a sharp
hiss.
	I backpedaled, bringing Kurenaikaze up, and then realized that
the hiss I'd heard had not been Asuka, but her weapon.  She had a
lightsaber, a scarlet one.  I felt a curious lack of fear, given that
I was about to die; Kurenaikaze is a strong blade, but it's still only
steel, and steel can't block a lightsaber's beam.
	There is a Katsujinkenryuu technique, the Blade of the Inviolate 
Soul, which enables a fighter, through focus and concentration, to back 
his blade with something akin to TK and make it do so.  Only the most
skilled, experienced, and powerful could achieve it.  Kaitlyn-sensei
could do it; it was one of the requirements for mastery.  I had heard
stories from her of her father, Gryphon-sensei, making his plain steel
blades all but indestructible, parrying blasterfire like a Jedi could
and cutting through armor and even force fields.  But he was something
like five hundred years old, and Detianism enhances the powers of the
mind anyway...
	... the point is, I couldn't do it, and without it I was about
to die, and the irony was that it probably wasn't her intent to kill
me.  After all, her master wanted me alive.  She had probably just
assumed that I would have a lightsaber too.  Some part of me hoped
spitefully that she would get in trouble for that, so that I could at
least jeer at her from the afterlife.
	A blue-white streak of light sprang across my vision, stopping
Asuka's strike cold, and then Rei shouldered me out of the path of the
redhead's weapon.
	"Maybe I should handle this one," she said softly.  "No
offense."
	"None taken," I said with a grin, and ducked around them to
run toward the other end of the hangar, where Roger was walking calmly
toward the back exit.  "Hold it!" I yelled, rage at what he'd done to the 
girl drowning out the fear as I chased him down.
	He paused at the door, turned, and smiled.
	"I'm sorry," he said.  "You've got courage, and I'd normally
honor that by dealing with you personally - but I've a ship to catch,"
he observed.  "At any rate, we'll have plenty of time to get to know
each other."
	"Like hell we - "
	I didn't get to finish my statement because somebody came up
and hit me in the forehead with a sledgehammer.  At least, that's
about what it felt like, except that a sledgehammer blow would
probably have hurt less.  I reeled; I probably gasped, but I'm not
sure, since my body and my mind were suddenly not on speaking terms.
I was still conscious, strictly speaking, but blind, deaf, and without
feeling, as a brilliant shriek blotted out everything that might have
been crossing my synapses, leaving me standing there staring at the
doorway without seeing as Roger left the building.
	I must have been even more worked up by his little speech than
I thought.  Normally I would have remembered that Psi Cops get to be
Psi Cops by having a P12 telepathy rating, and that was a good part of
why I, as a measly P3 teep, was afraid of them.  But that fact had
momentarily slipped my furious mind, allowing Roger an opportunity to
sucker-punch my cerebral cortex.
	Still, though it was a stunning blow, its effect didn't last
long; my disorganized consciousness jumbled itself back together
fairly quickly.  It lasted long enough, though.  By the time I could
think again, Roger was long gone, the door locked behind him.
	Cursing, I turned, intending to cross the hangar again and see
what I could do to help Rei.  There was a boy standing behind me.
	He was human or close to it, and like the redhead he looked
about fourteen.  He was thin, almost wiry.  He wasn't wearing a Psi
Corps uniform.  Instead, what he had on looked almost like a school
uniform - dark dress slacks, black leather shoes, a dark jacket with a
mandarin collar.  He had unkempt black hair and brown eyes that were
disturbingly blank, just like Asuka's had been.
	"Roger says I'm to subdue you," he said in a soft, husky
voice.  His tone wasn't as robotic as Asuka's had been.
	He had a lightsaber, too.  Damn.
	I put Kurenaikaze away and backed slowly away from him as he
raised the weapon and ignited its yellow blade.  I would have thought
that yellow would be a bad choice for a lightsaber, but it was
actually quite beautiful.  It glistened with a metallic golden sheen,
like a blade of molten gold.  I scowled at myself for -admiring- the
damn thing.
	He walked slowly toward me, the saber held almost vertical in
his hands, as I backed away slightly faster.  When it comes to
almost-certain death, I'm not too proud.  As soon as I had a good gap
built up, I broke to the right and ran for the other end of the
hangar.
	He ran after me, matching my pace easily.  Speedy little
bastard, I thought as he caught up and took a hack at me.  He missed
by a mile, so far that I didn't even have to duck or dodge.  I
resigned myself to dealing with him, since he was too fast for me to
run away from.
	Katsujinkenryuu does have empty-hand techniques.  They date
back to the form's predecessor, the Asagiri Shinjinkenryuu, and were
designed for dealing with other samurai if one has lost one's weapons
somehow.  They're not the bread and butter of the form, to be sure -
desperation tactics, more than anything else - but this was just the
kind of situation they had been designed for.  
	Except for the part about the enemy's blade being a
superheated plasma field capable of cutting through starship hulls,
anyway.  On the other hand, the early Asagiri weren't telekinetic - and 
they hadn't trained (briefly) with Aeryn Stonefist one summer.
	The kid took a few more wild swings at me, telegraphing them
so widely in advance that he might as well have stayed home.  I stole
the occasional glance at Rei's ongoing fencing match with the
redhead.  It was obvious from their differences in fighting style that
the kid I was up against was much the less experienced of the two, for
which I was grateful.  I had about as much experience with the
empty-hand techniques as he showed with that saber.  At least he
didn't seem to be in any danger of cutting his -own- legs off, let
alone mine.
	The next time he lunged I let him come, steeling myself, and
then thrust my TK against his saber.  I didn't know whether I could
affect the blade, but the saber itself had enough surface area that I
didn't really need to; all I had to do was deflect it a few inches to
the right, so that it passed me instead of skewering me.  I wouldn't
have tried that trick against an experienced opponent, but against
this kid it worked just fine.  He missed me by six inches and stumbled
past me with the unspent force of his strike.  I grabbed his right
wrist as he passed, gave it a yank to help him along, and jammed my
left elbow up under his chin.  The impact smacked his teeth together
with a painful-sounding crack, and the lightsaber dropped from his
hands, clattering to the floor, its blade vanishing.
	I quarter-turned, grabbed the front of his jacket, ankle-swept
him and bore him down to the concrete floor on his back, pulling my
right fist back for the knockout blow, when he raised his hands and
said,
	"Wait!  Don't hit me!"
	I blinked at him in surprise.  The tone of voice had been
bright, frightened, completely natural.  His eyes were clear, too, not
dull and flat like they had been when he had announced his orders for
me.  Cautiously, I stopped the blow from flying, but still held him to
the floor.
	He struggled, but not as though he wanted to resume the
fight.  "Please, you've got to let me up!" he pleaded, incipient panic
in his eyes.  "He had to push her harder than he's ever done before to
get her to fight the Jedi girl.  Her mind - it isn't strong enough -
the strain will drive her mad, maybe even kill her!  For God's sake!"
	He put both hands around my left forearm and strained at it,
trying to pry my hand away from his jacket, his teeth gritted with
effort, but it didn't avail him anything.  He wasn't a very athletic kid.
	"I'm not letting you up until you tell me what the hell is going 
on here," I said.
	"I can explain everything later!" he cried, thumping at my arm
with his fists.  "If you don't let me up right now Asuka will - she's
going to - "
	I looked up at Rei and Asuka, who were standing almost nose to
nose, glaring at each other through the glowing X of their lightsabers.
The redheaded girl was sweating profusely, a lot more than she should
have been in such a cool space even with the fight going on, and the
corners of her blank eyes were twitching with more than just exertion.
Her teeth were gritted, the muscles at the corners of her jaws bulging.
	It was at that moment that I became aware of a strange
undercurrent in the room, one similar to the unconscious telepathic
sense of local feeling I usually get, but different.  It was coming in
on a different "frequency band", like crosstalk on a communications
line, murmuring indistinctly in the background.
	Where each individual person's surface feelings had distinct,
identifiable sources and everything else was silence, this underlying
sense was like its converse: there was a constant background hum, into
which each individual person's state of mind injected interference
that created patterns.
	It was fascinating, but frightening.  What the hell was going
on?  What -was- it?
	Then it hit me.
	"Goddess," I whispered, inadvertently letting go of the kid as
I stared at Rei and Asuka and the interplay of energies I could now
see and hear around them.
	Roger was right.
	It was the Force.
	It murmured darkly around Rei and Asuka, touched by them both,
both dark but in very different ways.  Rei shaped it, directing it
into the patterns she needed, but Asuka was merely being pushed around
by it, like a puppet being driven by a tuned forcefield.  I used what
telepathic talent I had to try a surface scan on Asuka while I
listened to the snarling chorus of the Force around her.  What I got
back was mostly frustration, with a hard edge of desperate fear, all
of it drowning in the rage and hatred that were the Dark Side of the
Force at its worst.
	While I watched, it drowned completely, and something inside
Asuka Langley Soryuu broke with a palpable snap.  I winced in
sympathetic pain.
	"No, oh no!" the kid under me cried.  With strength born of
desperation, helped by the fact that I'd kind of stopped paying
attention to him, he threw me off him, scrambled to his feet and ran
toward them.  I sat where he'd thrown me, not caring, just staring at
the two young women.
	A howling shriek bubbled up out of the redhead's throat.  She
flung herself at Rei, her fighting style transformed in an instant
from mechanical competence to vicious excellence, the inspired,
ferocious brilliance of the utterly mad.  Her eyes had changed from
mindless blankness to glittering insanity in that brittle instant.
Foam gathered at the corners of her mouth as she hacked and drove at
Rei's defense, snarling like an animal.
	The pale girl's eyes had gone wide at the sudden transformation 
of her opponent; it was clear she didn't know what to make of it.  She
had been fighting down to Asuka's level before, not wanting to turn
loose her full strength and probably kill the girl.  Obviously Asuka's
life story, as related by Roger, had touched a chord somewhere in Rei.
	Now, though, I saw her scarlet eyes narrow grimly, and knew
she'd resigned herself to the kill.  My heart sank, even as I realized
she was probably right.  I had been looking right into the redhead's
mind when it had snapped.  The awful pressure of the Dark Side,
bearing down on top of the stress fractures of her mother's death and
five years of Roger's tender mercies, had crushed her sanity to dust.
Just feeling it happen had stunned me so much that I felt as if Roger
had teep-blasted me again.
	The change had Rei off-balance, too.  The sheer fury of
Asuka's assault drove her back, made her falter.  Her saber spun out
of her hand; she had another, of course, but there was a chance Asuka
might nail her before she could get it out.  I lunged, readying my TK
to try knocking her back - the shock of feeling her mind break had
left my own feeling like it was buried in tar, but I had to try -
	With a WHOOMP underscored by the sound of rending metal, a
hole six feet across appeared in the roof above us.  HK-47 dropped
through that hole like the proverbial ton of bricks a moment later,
his feet knocking inch-deep craters in the concrete floor as he fell
the thirty or so feet from the roof.
	Asuka snarled and whirled into an overhand strike, intending
to bring her blade down on the droid's head and destroy him in a
single stroke.  HK-47 swung his torso back, raising one arm to protect
his head.  That won't do any good, I thought, cursing the heaviness of
my head as I struggled to muster enough concentration to harness my
powers.
	The scarlet blade crashed down on the droid's upraised arm -
and stopped there.  Sparks flew in all directions and there was a
tremendous sizzling noise, like a giant arc welder.  As Asuka gritted
her teeth and drove harder, the armor plate under the blade began to
glow a dull red.
	"Ultimatum: You will cease this attack on the master or you
will be destroyed," HK-47 informed Asuka flatly.  His right hand was
full of heavy blaster, and at that range he could hardly miss.
	Finally, my head cleared, and I knew what I had to do.
Gathering my strength, I flung it against the redhead.  She wasn't
ready for it - she wasn't even really aware I was there - and the body
blow catapulted her backward.  Her lightsaber flew out of her hand as
she slammed into the tin wall of the hangar, rebounded, and crumpled
to her knees.  That inhuman snarling sound was still coming from her,
and even as she hit the floor she was trying to get up.
	HK-47 had both weapons out now, and stepped forward, leveling
them.
	"Query: Shall I blast her?" he asked.
	With the faintest sad shake of her head, Rei stepped past him.
Asuka jumped up and lunged for her barehanded.  Rei knocked her down
again with a deceptively powerful punch, then drew her other lightsaber.
Standing over the redhead, she leveled the point of it at Asuka's
throat.  A tear gathered at the corner of one red eye and rolled down
her pale cheek as she raised the blade.  Her lips moved in a whisper I
was too far away to hear, but I knew what she was saying nonetheless:
	"I'm sorry."
	"STOOOOOOOOOP!!!" the boy I'd fought screamed, reaching them
at a dead run and throwing himself between them, his arms outflung in
the universal gesture of protection.  "Don't kill her!"
	Rei jerked back as if slapped, her eyes going wide with
surprise well out of proportion with his unexpected appearance.
	"Shinji!" she gasped, and then the reason for her surprise was
clear.  This was the young man she'd come to Jisatsu to help.
	Should have known, I mused to myself.  These things always tie
back on themselves somehow, especially when Big Fire is involved.
	Rei composed herself and said softly, "Stand aside, Shinji.
She's beyond help.  It... "  She bowed her head, letting another tear
fall.  "It will be a mercy," she finished, meeting the boy's eyes
again.
	Asuka recovered her wits, what remained of them, and scrambled
to her feet, her wild blue eyes searching for her weapon.  She saw it
and lunged to Rei's left, tucking into a single forward roll across
the concrete and coming up with the blade springing to life in her
hand, then took one bounding step toward her opponent, screaming in
incoherent defiance.
	"Statement: You had your warning, meatbag!" HK-47 barked,
raising his blasters.
	Shinji turned, interposed himself again with his back to Rei
and HK-47 this time, and shouted, "Asuka, STOP IT!"
	His mind smashed into what remained of hers like a wrecking
ball; I could feel the telepathic impact from where I sat and it made
me wince.  She stopped dead in her tracks, the lightsaber falling from
her hands.  The crazed spark faded from her eyes, and for a moment
they were just normal blue eyes as they looked at him.
	Then they went blank, consciousness fizzling out of them
completely; they rolled up, showing the whites, then closed as she
slumped to the floor.  Shinji jumped forward with a gasp of dismay and
caught her, then lowered her gently down, dropping to his knees and
cradling her against his chest.
	Rei stared at her friend, surprise again written on her face;
then she extinguished her blade and put it away.  At the slightest
gesture of her hand, HK-47 holstered his blasters, but from his body
language, he clearly didn't like the idea.
	"Shinji," she said softly, a note of something like wonder in
her eyes.
	I got shakily to my feet, picked up his lightsaber, and walked
over to them.
	"What did you just do to her?" Rei asked him.
	He started at the sound of my voice, turned toward me with a
little cringe, as though he expected me to hit him, and held her
unconscious form a little tighter, protectively.  "I-I stopped her,"
he said.  "I wish I could've been gentler, but... there was no time."
	"I've only seen somebody just -drop- like that," I said
softly, "when a Psi Cop's hit them.  What's your P-rating?"
	He looked at the floor and mumbled something inaudible.
	"What?" I asked.
	"P14," he said miserably.
	I blinked, eyes wide.  P14!  That was two levels higher than
the requirement for becoming a Psi Cop, -four- levels higher than the
standard level of Psi Corps instructors!  Maybe two percent of the
human telepath population could claim a power level that high.
	Rei put her hand on his shoulder.  "How long have you known?"
she asked.
	"Since a couple of weeks after they grabbed me," he replied.
"When they brought me to Roger and he found out I have Force
potential, too.  He wasn't able to awaken it, but he's sure it's
there.  While he was trying, he unlocked more of my telepathy by
accident.  It hadn't fully awakened yet, but once it did... well, I
was more powerful than he was, but without any training... I could
convince Roger that I was really his slave, but I couldn't... fix
what's wrong with his mind."  He looked at her with horror joining the
fear in his eyes.  "He's the craziest person I've ever seen."
	"Oh, Shinji... " said Rei, shaking her head.  "I'm sorry."  So
she understood, then, as I did, what a curse Shinji's power could be.
I thought I'd had a hard time keeping the feelings and voices at bay
as an untrained P3.  What must he be going through?
	"He doesn't know what you are," she said, not really a
question.
	"No," said Shinji.  "If he did he'd never have tried to teach
me Turhan Kai; it's too dangerous."  He looked at me.  "I'm sorry for
attacking you.  I couldn't be sure that Roger wasn't monitoring
me... I had to make it look good."
	I mustered a smile for him.  "So you're really better than
that?" I asked.
	"Not much," he replied wryly; then the pleasure vanished from
his face.  "Anyway, like I said... I haven't had the power long.  I
managed to stop Asuka from being so angry, but... "  He shook his head
sadly, and then the sadness turned to anger.  He dashed irritably at
the tears forming in his eyes with one hand, still holding her with
the other.  "That -bastard-," he spat.  "She never wanted to be a
killer.  He made her into that, and it... it broke her."
	The Master Key vibrated softly against the back of my skull.
[Anne,] came Ru-ah's voice.
	<Yes.>
	[Are you all right?]
	<Fine.  Pissed off, but fine.  What's up?>
	[The ship is secured.  It's a Corellian, 2000-series, two
crew.  They took to the escape pods when I tractored the ship.  I'm
entering a parking orbit with it right now.  The International Police
are sending a jumpship from New Avalon; they should be here in five
minutes.]
	I was impressed.  Ships equipped with jump drive, as opposed
to hyperdrive or warp drive, can go anywhere in the charted universe
almost instantly, but they're incredibly expensive to operate.  If the
Experts were sending one here, then that meant they were taking this
very seriously indeed.
	<Good,> I told her.  <We'll be there presently.>
	Then I turned to the others and said, "OK, come on."
	Shinji nodded, then surprised me by gathering Asuka up in his
arms and getting to his feet.  Looking at his skinny body, I wouldn't
have thought he'd be strong enough to carry an athletic girl like her,
but though the effort showed on his face, he didn't betray it with a
sound.

	By the time we got to the Autumn Heart, the IPO jumpship had
arrived and was in the process of sorting out the escape pods from the
ship Ru-ah had captured.  While HK-47 showed Shinji where he could
stow his unconscious payload for the time being, Rei and I went to the
bridge.
	"What's going on?" I asked Ru-ah as we left the lift.
	"The IPO starship is hailing."
	"Put them on," I said.  A moment later, the forward
holographic display fuzzed and displayed the face of another redheaded
young woman, this one in her early twenties and rather less crazed.
	"Hi, Ayla," I said, smiling.  Under the circumstances, it was
always good to see a familiar face.
	"Hey, Anne," Ayla Ranzz replied.  "Looks like you've shoved a
stick in a hornet's nest.  These guys didn't even wait to get out of
the escape pods before they lawyered up."
	"Was there a Psi Cop aboard the ship?"
	"Nope.  Just a couple of Detrek mercenaries.  My team's
sweeping the holds now, but our telepath isn't picking anything up."
	"Damn.  That means he's still loose down on the planet
someplace.  I guess we're gonna have to go get him."
	Ayla's face fell.  "I wish I could come with you," she said,
"but half of these guys are trainees.  We thought this was a routine
smuggler intercept."  She sighed, running a hand back over her short
orange hair.  "Guess I should've figured otherwise coming from you,"
she added with a rueful grin.
	"I do seem to attract them, don't I?" I said ruefully.  "Well,
if we get into too much trouble, we'll try to find a way to call."
	Ayla nodded.  "We'll be keeping an eye out.  Ranzz out."
	Rei and I went back to the living deck, to the guest cottage
where Shinji had tucked away Roger's erstwhile apprentice.
	"Looks like Tremayne got away," I said.  "Do you know where
his base is?"
	Shinji nodded.  "Sure.  He and his Big Fire contacts run the
network out of an abandoned fort, or castle, or something like that,
up in the Danuuvii Mountains north of the city.  Are you going to
fight him?"
	I glanced at Rei; she nodded, once, something unpleasant in
her eyes.
	"Yeah," I said with a slightly tired grin, "it looks like we
are."
	"I'll take you there," he said.
	"No," I told him.  "You have another job to do.  You stay here
and look after her," I said, nodding to the sleeping girl.  "I don't
need a crazed, Force-wielding telepath running loose on my ship."
	He hesitated, obviously torn between wanting to help his
friend and wanting to do the more obviously brave thing and help us
attack his tormentor.  Finally he nodded, impressing me again with the
fact that he had more common sense than bravado - unusual in a teenage
boy.  (Or a teenage girl, for that matter, I shouldn't be sexist.  I
know -I- had more bravado than common sense at that age.)
	"You can count on me," he said.
	I smiled.  "If you need help with anything, just ask Ru-ah.
She'll be around."
	"Can you show us on a map where the castle is before we
leave?" Rei asked.
	"Yes," Shinji said.  "But be careful!" he added as we heading
for the door.  "Big Fire has a lot of agents there, and the woman who
runs the network along with Roger is really scary.  Her name is Atros
somethingorother."
	Rei blinked in mild surprise.  "Atros Eternas."
	I made eye contact with her.  "One of the Magnificent Ten," I
said; she nodded.
	"Oh boy," I said.
	As we left the hangar, I linked with Ru-ah again and got her
to patch me through to Ayla.  This was a neat trick we'd figured out
early in our partnership: By linking with her through the Master Key
and having her access the ship's comm system, I could present the
illusion that I was on the bridge talking to some outside person, like
Ayla, through the comm system, when I was really somewhere else
entirely and the conversation was happening in my head, brokered
through my link with Ru-ah.
	As I had expected, the good news made Ayla no happier than it
made me.
	"Maybe you ought to wait for reinforcements.  I can have
another team here in half an hour if I speed-charge the jump drive."
	"Or you could end up in the Greater Cloud Galaxy," I pointed
out.  "Anyway, if we wait, they'll get away.  They're probably getting
ready to bug out right now."
	Ayla paused, then sighed.  "... Dammit.  You're right, but...
OK, go, but be careful."
	"Against these guys?  Never anything but."
	I broke the link and went to my quarters to dress for the
occasion.
	Deciding what to wear isn't a process that nomally takes me
very long.  Most of my days are spent aboard ship, and for shipboard
wearing I have a number of more or less identical coveralls.  The
pockets can be indispensable.
	For this, I thought it was important to make a statement, so I
opened up a drawer I don't open all that often.  I put on my old blue
jeans, hunted around and found an Art of Noise T-shirt from the
"Destination: Earth" tour, put on my sneakers instead of my boots, and
then dug around in the closet for the jacket Saionji had made for me
when I passed my journeyman's test.
	It was made of soft grey leather, now a bit battered with hard
traveling.  On the back it had a unique symbol embossed into the
leather, an ash-tree holding up the Seal of the Order of the Rose with
its branches.  It also had an Order of the Rose blood chit - a small
piece of sturdy silk marked with the Order's flag and a short message
from the Grand Duelist instructing all Cephireans to treat the bearer
with the respect due a Duelist - sewn to the left shoulder.
	This was a special garment to me, and I generally refused to
wear it into cesspits like Jisatsu... but this was a special occasion.  
The jacket with its Duelist's rose and the Art of Noise T-shirt with
the tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of our involvement in the
Federation Civil War would combine to send a very distinct message to
Roger Tremayne:
	Hey, jackass, guess what?  Kaitlyn's crew isn't finished with
you yet.
	Before putting on the jacket, I belted on the holster rig for
my Colt .32 pistol, then made sure the gun was ready and secure before
strapping on my swords - both of them, another rarity for me.  I
braided up my hair, then bundled the braid up in thirds and secured it
to the back of my head with a hachimaki.
	Having long hair is all well and good, but I've been whipped
in the face by my braid too many times to leave it to its own devices
when I know I'm going to be fighting.  (Kaitlyn-sensei has longer hair
than mine, and yet that sort of thing never seems to happen to her.
Maybe someday I'll figure out how she does it.)
	Then I called Archie.
	"Ready for some action?" I asked him.
	He smiled, as much as a cat can smile.
	"Any time," he said, and trotted out with me to the lift.

	We rented a speeder to get us into the mountains.  HK-47 did
the driving so that the two of us organic meatbags could rest up and
center ourselves for what was sure to be a trying experience.
	If I had known then just -how- trying it was going to be, I'd
probably have stayed in bed that morning.

	I won't bore you with the details of how we got into the
castle, which was right where Shinji said it was.  His memory of the
internal arrangement was a bit sketchy.  He hadn't really been paying
attention to that; most of his mental bandwidth was spent on keeping
Roger from realizing his deception.  And of course he knew nothing of
the security that might exist outside the castle itself.
	As such, once we got to the mountain itself, we were more or
less on our own.  Between Rei's connection with the Force and my
low-level telepathy, we managed to avoid patrols and perimeter
security systems.  As for penetrating the building itself, that was
easy.  The castle wasn't just abandoned, it was in ruins.  The outer
walls had big, crumbling holes in them.  The trick was getting inside
without pulling anything else down, not finding a place to get
through.
	It was hard to tell, Rei being Rei, but I think I surprised
her a little bit by bringing Archie with us.  She didn't say anything,
but I caught a whiff of faint puzzlement.  I could understand that.
Sure, Archie can -talk-, but apart from that he doesn't seem to be
anything particularly special.  Certainly not the kind of companion
animal you'd take along with big trouble expected.  Not like, say,
Sergei, Kaitlyn-sensei's 500-pound Siberian tiger.
	So when we slipped into the castle and I called quietly for
Archie, Rei turned and had just started to raise an eyebrow very
slightly when he went to work.
	He took two running steps toward me, then leaped, almost as if
he were attacking.  In mid-air, his body changed, flattening and
elongating, almost seeming to become plastic.  When he struck me, he
flowed around me, wrapping around my torso and settling into a
snug-fitting solidity again.  It was a peculiar sensation, and one I
never quite got used to, but once he was in place, the feeling was a
warm and comforting one.
	Archie came from a planet called Roshtaria, where his kind
were genetically engineered in ancient times to serve as protectors
for the royal family.  Today, not many people have heard of Roshtaria; 
it's beyond the Outer Rim Territories, off on the Coreward Rim, and
almost impossible to stumble across by accident.  I'd spend a couple
of months there, years before, and when I left, Archie went with me.
	Roshtarian armor cats are handy creatures.  Not only are they
smart enough to be pretty good company, they're also much stronger and
tougher than they look, with claws capable of scratching concrete.
And, of course, they have this body-morphing trick, which makes them
damn good body armor.  I'd been assured that Archie was proof against
small arms (bullets and blasterfire) as well as most melee weapons,
and on a couple of occasions he'd proven it.  He didn't -enjoy-
proving it, but it wouldn't do him any lasting harm.
	A person looks a little weird with a slightly shaggy,
flattened housecat wrapped around her body, its head near her right
shoulder.  At the very least, it makes a statement.  In this case,
having Archie in place would also obscure part of the statement I
-wanted to make, which I hadn't thought of when I put on the T-shirt,
but that's life.  I'd take missing that part of the message in return
for not ending up with a hole in me.
	We slowly worked our way through the castle's ruined
corridors, making our way ever deeper into the building.  There didn't
seem to be anything or anyone about.  By the time we reached the great
hall, a huge, vault-ceilinged room the size of a football field, we
were starting to wonder if we'd come too late after all.
	The room, like the rest of the castle, had seen better days.
The damage here was more pronounced.  Some shift of the planet had
almost torn the room in half, causing one of the walls to crumble and
leaving a ravine just slightly wider than a comfortable jump running
clear across the flagstoned floor.
	The hall was empty.  Well, almost empty.  Standing near the
big wooden door leading out of the far side of the room was a suit of
armor, the kind of armor a samurai might have worn in the old days.
It was black and grey with red trim, and featured a helmet with a mask
painted in the leering likeness of a human face.  I found it deeply
creepy.  Some Big Fire type's idea of a decoration, making the drafty
old heap a little more villainously homey?  That was a darkly amusing
idea... 
	The doors opened as we made our way around the ravine (it got
a little narrower toward one side of the room), and out came Roger
Tremayne.
	"You certainly took your time," he said calmly.  "Ko-Enshaku.
Neutralize them.  Remember what I told you."
	I had a half-second to wonder who the hell he was talking to
before the suit of samurai armor moved.

	/*  White Zombie  "I, Zombie (Europe in the Raw Mix)"
		   _Supersexy Swingin' Sounds_  */

	Now, I'm not exactly the galaxy's least observant person,
Neither is Rei, and HK-47's constant scanning of his environment
leaves us both behind, at least in terms of visual sensing.  None of
us had any inkling that the thing was anything but a suit of armor
before it moved.  It hadn't been breathing, hadn't moved the slightest
bit, and had registered no power signature that might have tipped
HK-47 off had it been another droid.
	Until it moved, it had no psionic resonance and no effect on
the Force.
	When it moved, that was a different story.  It still gave me
nothing on my telepathy, but Force-wise, it was as though Roger's
words had opened a portal that brought another person into the room...
a person whose touch against the Force was as cold and black as death
itself.
	Ko-Enshaku swept forward, gliding across the broken stone
floor without seeming to take steps, and drew a katana from his side.
	"Statement: I've got him, master," HK-47 announced, drawing
his blasters.  He stepped smoothly in front of Rei and began pumping
scarlet fire at the oncoming warrior.
	Ko-Enshaku's scarlet cloak started swirling around him as he
approached.  HK-47's blasterfire ricocheted off the swirling cloth,
bouncing away to scorch the walls and corners harmlessly.  Before the
surprised droid could alter his strategy, Ko-Enshaku lunged past him.
There was a harsh metallic noise, a combination of a scrape and a
clang, and a burst of sparks flew from the droid's side as the
creature's blade slashed through his armor and tore through his
internal mechanisms.
	While HK-47 staggered, Ko-Enshaku stopped, tore his blade
free, and palmstruck the droid in the middle of the plastron with his
other hand.  With a snarl of feedback blasting from his speaker grille, 
HK-47 toppled over the edge of the crevasse in the middle of the room
and vanished into the darkness below.
	Rei whirled, her lightsaber igniting, but before she could
take a step, she was suddenly reeling for no visible cause.  I knew
what it was, all the same.  Roger's tense stance and narrowed eyes
would have told the story, even if the psionic blast he'd just
unleashed on her hadn't registered like the sound of a nearby car
crash to my own telepathic gift.  She had training in psionic defense,
of course, and the mental resilience of a Jedi is nothing to sneeze
at, but non-Force telepathy was alien to her experience and all her
attention had been focused on Ko-Enshaku.  It was a lapse, and one
that cost her.
	She recovered admirably, her stance straightening well before
mine would have after such a blast.  She managed to duck Ko-Enshaku's
first strike by inches, then slip back out of his reach and try to
regroup.  I shook myself out of my reverie - a lapse on -my- part, and
one that could cost both of us - and started to draw Kurenaikaze.
	Rei's foot slipped on one of the broken stones at the edge of
the same ravine.  She was in no great danger, even so - Ko-Enshaku was
out of position, and by the time he could strike I would be there -
but she was off-balance and vulnerable.
	Which was when Roger played his next card, bending the Force
into something like telekinesis and swatting her off the edge of the
ravine the way a person might plunk an errant cat off the back of a
couch.
	I made eye contact with her past Ko-Enshaku's shoulder for an
instant, that long instant when she couldn't possibly avoid falling
but hadn't actually started doing it yet.  There was no fear in her
eyes; just a mild sort of regret, as if to say, Is this the best I
could do?  How sad.
	Then she, too, was gone, and I was alone except for Archie -
alone against this Psi Cop and this... this -thing-, and maybe one of
the Magnificent Ten as well.
	I thrust it all out of my mind, finished drawing my blade, and
presented it in challenge.  Ko-Enshaku turned, readied himself, and
lunged.
	I tried to defend myself and keep an eye out for whatever
Roger's next dirty trick would be at the same time.  It was a losing
proposition.  Whatever Ko-Enshaku was, he (it?) was a swordsman of
breathtaking ability.  I could keep him at bay, but not make any gains
against him, and I didn't have much doubt which of us would tire first.
There just didn't seem to be any way for me to win this fight... 
	... unless I changed the rules.
	I gathered my will, drove my blade against Ko-Enshaku's,
twisted, and then shoved him away with all my strength, physical and
mental.  He wasn't prepared for the extra push my TK gave him and
skidded a dozen yards away, nearly but not quite losing both his
balance and his grip on his sword.  Immediately he regrouped and
started coming toward me again.
	I'd formed an opinion of what Ko-Enshaku was while fighting
him, and feeling his resonance on what little I yet knew of the
Force.  I'd heard of creatures like him before, in myths and legends,
and I'd seen enough in my time as a Duelist to know that most of those
legends had a basis in fact.  I figured he wasn't a person at all, but
a kind of ghost - a spectral force animating an empty suit of armor.
	Hauntings like that usually have a focus, and looking at
Ko-Enshaku's grinning face, I thought I knew what that focus was.
	I switched Kurenaikaze to my left hand, drew the .32 automatic
my first lover gave me, thumbed off the safety, and opened fire.
Ko-Enshaku saw me draw and started that swirling cloak trick again,
but that didn't matter.  I wasn't shooting at his body.
	I could feel my eyes get hot and knew they were glowing as I
squeezed off three rounds in rapid succession, backing them up with the
force of my most powerful psionic gift.  When the bullets left the
divinely boosted weapon's muzzle, they were each sheathed in a jacket
of pure white flame.
	They punched three neat holes in Ko-Enshaku's mask, one in each
eye and one dead-center in the middle of his forehead.
	I was right.  There was nothing behind the mask but empty
space - nothing physical, anyway.
	The barrage halted the creature's charge, causing him to pull
up short and recoil back, almost as if he were trying to get away.
Smoke curled up from the holes in his mask as he stood, slightly
unsteady, for a moment - 
	- then toppled over backward with a harsh clatter and lay
still.
	I switched the Colt's safety back on, holstered it, and turned
to deal with Roger.
        The fist came out of nowhere, punching up from under into the
gap over my right hip where Archie didn't quite cover me, and slammed
into me like a battering ram.  I doubled over, stars swimming across
my vision, and was blacking out even as I registered that the arm
connected to the fist buried in my side was much too slim to belong to
Roger Tremayne.

	I came to with the not-particularly-comforting hardness of
iron at my throat, ankles and wrists, and the cold, deadening hum of a
neural blocker at the back of my head.  The panic that always comes
from being blocked rose up in me; I fought it down, turned it to smoke
with a mantra I'd learned from an old wisewoman who respected a young
loreseeker.  Then I started taking stock.
	I hurt all over, but there were no sharp pains anywhere.  The
gut blow that had brought me down had apparently not damaged anything
permanently - it had just put me down from sheer system shock, as such
blows are designed to do.
	I kept my breathing deep and regular, partly as a relaxation
exercise, partly to simulate continued unconsciousness, and partly to
see how my ribs were.  They felt all right.
	Finally I opened my eyes and looked around.
	I was in what must have been the old castle's throne room, a
large open space (but nowhere near as large as the great hall) with a
three-step dais at one end.  Lying on my right side with my hands and
feet chained together behind me, I couldn't see much, but since I was
on the floor at one side of the dais, I could see enough of the room
to guess what the whole thing looked like.
	The throne was gone, but there was a regular chair standing
where it should have been.  In that chair sat a slim, tallish woman in
a bright red bodysuit under weird, alien-looking armor.  She had a
thick, unruly sheaf of jet-black hair and a sardonic, mocking look.
I'd seen her before, in file pictures.
	This was the member of Big Fire's Magnificent Ten named Atros
Eternas, believed killed in 2389 by PCHammer, believed killed again in
2396 by Chief Gryphon, believed killed AGAIN in 2404 by Wolverine, and
so forth.
	To my shock, Ko-Enshaku was standing silently next to her
chair, his mask back in one hole-less piece.
	Well, you were -half- right about him, I told myself ruefully.
	On the other side of the chair sat a force cage with something
black and furry inside.  I stared hard at it and saw that Archie was
breathing.
	Good.  I had enough reasons to want this woman dead as it was.
	"Ah, good, you're awake," she said, smiling at me.  I glared
at her.  I wouldn't give her the satisfaction of struggling against
the chains.
	"There's no need to look so hostile," she said.  "I have a
proposition for you."
	"I'm not interested in anything you might propose," I snarled.
	She shook her head, looking sad.  "At least hear me out... not
that you have a choice."  Getting up from the chair, she paced across
the dais and crouched next to me, turning me onto my back and hauling
me up into a kind of half-assed seiza so she could look me straight in
the face.
	"Roger thinks that he's to have you," she said.  "He thinks
that the terms of his agreement with Big Fire entitle him to -all-
telepaths that come into our power during the operation.  He can smell
the Force around you - heightened, I'm sure, by your association with
that Dark Jedi girl - and he's quite eager to begin training you in
Turhan Kai."
	"I'll die first," I said.  It might have seemed a hollow
threat to Atros - after all, I was bound and blockered, hardly in a
position to kill myself - but I meant it.  There are ways.
	"I have an alternative," she said.
	I made myself look interested.  "I'm listening," I said.
	"You have a mix of talents, abilities, and equipment that I,
as a member of Big Fire's Magnificent Ten, find very intriguing."
	I gave her my most insolent grin and said, "Last time I heard,
the Experts of Justice had knocked you down to the Fairly Decent Six."
	She ignored the barb and soldiered on, "There is tremendous
potential in you, my dear, waiting to be unlocked.  We could have a
place for you in our organization, and in the new galactic order that
will emerge after all is said and done."
	I narrowed my eyes at her.  "Keep talking."
	Atros smiled, nodded with satisfaction, and stood up.  "I'll
offer you a choice, then - a simple 'yes' or 'no'.  If your answer is
'no', then you go through those doors - "  She pointed at the double
doors in the other end of the room, opposite the dais.  " - in chains,
your talents blocked.  I give you to Roger and that, if you're the
kind of girl who keeps her promises, is the end of you."
	She crouched down again, almost nose to nose with me, and said
softly, "If your answer is 'yes', then the chains and the blocker fall
away.  Your weapons and your... interesting... pet are returned to you.
You and I go through the doors together, and I announce to Roger, and
to the world, that you are my apprentice, to be sponsored for one of
the vacancies which, as you so incisively point out, currently exist
in the Magnificent Ten.  Then we'll leave Roger to his petty schemes,
get out of this place and set about shaking the galaxy."  She stood up
again, smiled down at me.
	"What do you say?"
	So here it was, the final decision gate.  I could keep my
integrity, or I could keep my life.
	... unless I changed the rules.
	I mustered the most predatory grin I could manage.
	"I'm in," I said.
	Atros smiled.  "Excellent."
	She waved a hand; the chains and the dull ache of the blocker
fell away.  I got to my feet, brushed myself off.  Now that the
decision was made, I felt no particular excitement - just a sort of
dull undercurrent of anticipation.
	I took my swords and gun back from Atros without looking eager
about it, then put them in their places with studied nonchalance.  She
was even kind enough to rouse Archie from his sedated slumber.
	"What's going on?" he whispered groggily as he wrapped himself
around my body again.
	"Later," I told him.  "Whatever happens, just stay quiet."
	He glanced sidelong at my face, his own expression worried,
but subsided.
	Atros was on my left and Ko-Enshaku on my right as we went
through the big double doors and into the great hall beyond.  Roger
had been pacing the room; he was forty feet or so from the doors when
he turned to watch us enter, a frown creasing his ascetic face.  I
glanced at the ravine in the ruined floor where Rei and HK-47 had
vanished, looked away, looked straight at Roger as I crossed the floor
and stopped ten feet from him.
	He scowled at me, look away at Atros, who had halted some
distance behind me.  "What's the meaning of this?" he demanded.  "This
girl was to be stripped of her weapons and fitted with a blocker
before delivery.  I haven't the time to render her tractable through
more permanent methods before we leave here."
	Atros's voice was a cold hiss as she replied, "You do not give
me orders, Psi Cop.  She's leaving with -me-.  I'm taking her as my
apprentice, to be nominated for Gilbert's position in the Magnificent
Ten."
	Roger didn't fluster easily.  He stared at her with his cold
gray eyes, his face blank, and said, "That is unacceptable."
	"Unless you wish to test yourself against me," she replied,
"you will have to -learn- to accept it.  Come, Anne.  It's time we
left this place."
	I nodded, made to turn and follow her out.
	The trick was not thinking about it before doing it, so Roger
had nothing to pick up on.
	I exploded into motion without any conscious thought, my body
following a pattern so well-drilled it no longer required any
instructions from my brain other than, "Go."
	Kurenaikaze was a silver flash, leaping from the scabbard like
a live thing, the grip light and natural in my hands.  I turned into
it with shoulders, hips and everything else, the kiai rolling up from
my diaphragm and bursting from my throat to resound in the rafters and
explode what glass remained in the high windows.
	That Shattering Thunderbolt Strike was everything I had, my
absolute very best shot.  It carried me past him, the impact jarring
and sliding up my arms, warm wetness flecking my face.  Blood ran down
Kurenaikaze's blade and dripped to the cracked stone floor.
	Slowly, slowly, we turned to face each other.
	Roger's face was as blank as before, and he fixed me with his
cold stare again.  Trying to frighten me, but I was beyond that.
	He reached to the gash in his side, touched it, looked at the
crimson smear on his hand, and then his face did a ghastly thing: it
smiled.
	Roger laughed.
	"Quite remarkable," he observed.  "Why, you've very nearly cut
me in two."  He probed at the wound with a curious finger, and
something sparked and glinted inside him, behind the blood and slashed
muscle.
	Then his lightsaber was in his hand and he was coming for me.
	Without thinking, still locked into the life-or-death
awareness of the duel, I slipped back from his first strike and moved
into a parry.  His saber sparked against Kurenaikaze's steel - stopped
- bounced away.
	The Blade of the Inviolate Soul.
	The Final Defensive Technique, the mark of mastery itself.
	I'd done it.

 /*  Toshihiko Sahashi  "Stoning"  _Big-O! Original Sound Score_  */

	The surge of triumph fueled a counterattack that drove him
back two paces.  I left Kurenaikaze in my right hand, drew Kurenaishio
with my left, and rebalanced myself.  He faded back, struck at my
left.  His telepathic assault surged against my mental barriers at the
same time, but as I parried his blade with Kurenaishio, I wasn't
trying to hold his mental attack back with just my measly P3 teep
talent anymore.  There were other energies flowing around me and my
blades that stopped his telepathic thrust like a plasma shield stops a
bullet.
	When that happened he faltered for a half-instant, his own
barriers flickering as he registered the shock that I really was
touching my own talent and the Force at the same time, just as he
did.  I took advantage of the opening to drive one of my own weapons
through the crack in his armor.
	The firebolt flayed his chest, flash-seared his face like
Cajun-style swordfish.  He staggered, regrouped.  I can't fault his
courage or his endurance; in that state, he kept fighting.  He never
made a sound, except for the sharp hissing of his breath, in and out,
in and out, through his clenched and blackened teeth, his eyes
surrounded by burnt meat but still glaring and bright.
	The pain and shock were bound to have some effect, though, and
as I backed him toward the ravine, he got a little too overeager
trying to reverse the flow away from the drop.  He dropped his back
foot, set himself, and drove with his legs, aiming his saber for my
midsection.
	I blocked him with Kurenaishio.  The blades clashed
together with a bright flare of light.  Roger snarled and threw all
his strength against me, knowing that his cyborg body should be able
to overpower my own smaller, thinner frame.  Maybe that would have
been true in a simple strength-on-strength contest, but we were far
beyond that level by now.
	"You filth," I said to Roger.  "You thought you could own me?
Turn me into a good little robot assassin like that poor girl Asuka?
Is that what you thought?"
	He snarled, redoubled his efforts to no avail.  His eyes
burned into mine, and I looked right back at him.  The confidence
melted out of those eyes as we stood there, locked together, quivering
with effort.
	"How could you believe I would -ever- submit to that?  Did you
think I would swallow your Psi Corps party line bullshit?  'The Corps
is Mother, the Corps is Father.'  Or did you plan to take me by force?
Break my will with drugs and psychic torture, plunge me into madness,
destroy what I am and make me into what you -want- me to be?"
	He hissed, his scorched face a mask of hate, and strained
again, but I held firm.  I backed my own strength with TK, matching
him blade to blade - and there was something else besides, flowing in
from outside and infusing my own aura with strength beyond anything
I'd ever experienced before - the same strength which had enabled my
puny TP barrier to blunt Roger's psionic thrust as if it were nothing
at all.
	It was such an exhilarating sensation I wanted to shout.
	So I did:
	"NEVER!"
	Roger skidded back almost twenty feet, the heel of his right
boot popping out over the edge of the ravine.  The sleeves and
trousers of his wracked Psi Corps uniform rippled as in a heavy wind.
Sixty feet behind him the stone-block wall shivered, cracked, and
dented in a circular pattern, as though a giant fist had struck it.
	"It seems Kyouichi Saionji didn't quite manage to kill you,
Roger Tremayne," I hissed as I put Kurenaishio away and took its
greater companion in both hands again, feeling the power surge around
me in a wave.  "But I will gladly finish the job for him."
	I rode the crest of that wave, gathering it all to me, pushing
it into my pyrokinetic talent.  Flames raced up and down the gleaming
steel of Kurenaikaze's blade; they danced across my skin; they raced
around me in a circle twelve feet wide, scorching a ring in the stone
beneath me.
	Roger wobbled on the precipice, regained his balance, stared
at me with an expression of dawning hatred and understanding.
	I raised Kurenaikaze above my head, then reversed it,
point down, edge toward my enemy.
	"It's time you Psi Corps bastards learned that you're not
entitled to anything just because you think you can take it!" I cried
over the roar of the fire-circle spinning around me.
	Roger raised his lightsaber and set himself to charge.
	"Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu!" I declared, then dropped to one
knee, drove the point of Kurenaikaze into the floor, and used its
edge as the outlet to the envelope of power I'd been amassing.
	"DRAGON'S - BREATH!"
	The energy I'd built up screamed across the twenty feet
between me and Roger in a vertical crescent, starting at the edge of
Kurenaikaze and growing as it went; it was twice his height by the
time it reached him, and the part spawned by the sword's point split
the stone floor as it passed before gushing out into the ravine.  He
howled in pain and rage as a fountain of fire slammed into him,
stripping away what remained of his uniform and flinging him up and
back, his lightsaber spinning out of his hand.
	As his smoking body reached apogee, though, he got hold of
himself and demonstrated the stamina and self-possession that had made
him such a feared man out on the Far Rim.  He tucked, rolled, and
seemed to land, though parallel to the ground, on one of the high
ceiling's oaken crossbeams.  His lightsaber reversed its flight and
flew to his hand even as he kicked off, diving down at me like a
stooping hawk.  The tip of his blade of light searched for my heart as
he dove, roaring.
	I stood and stepped back, returning Kurenaikaze to the ready,
and slipped the strike to the right.  The beam of his lightsaber
glanced off my shoulder, drawing an indignant yowl from Archie, and
Roger's momentum carried him past me.  I pivoted on my heel as he
passed and brought Kurenaikaze down in a perfect Falling Water Cut.
	Roger's body crashed to the floor and skidded to a halt at my
feet.	
	His lightsaber clattered out of his hand and went spinning
into the ravine.
	His head bounced merrily across the room and rolled to a halt
at Atros's feet, bumping gently against her right boot.
	His Psi Corps badge, which had barely clung to what remained
of his tunic, popped free as his body hit and tinkled across the
stone, coming to rest next to my foot.  Without looking at it, I got a
toe under it and flicked it contemptuously into the ravine.
	Then I turned to face Atros, swept Kurenaikaze clean, and
sheathed it home, locked on her eyes the whole time.
	She smiled.
	"I see," she said.  "I underestimated you.  Very well done."
She clenched a fist.  Red light gathered around it, and then sprang
up, a beam saber without a projector.  So it was true - she was an
energy manipulator, and a high-level one at that.
	"Even so," she went on, "you're quite exhausted now.  You'll
never defeat me alone."
	She was right.  Bringing down Roger had taken everything I
had.  Pride was keeping me on my feet, keeping my eyes on hers, but
when she came for me, I wasn't sure I'd have anything more than an
opening to throw at her.
	Oh, well.  I'd make her know she'd been in a fight, anyway...
	A flicker of black to my right, something dark leaping up out
of the ravine, faster than the eye could follow.  A snap-hiss, that
so-very-distinctive sound, and the smile broke apart the warrior scowl
on my face as the blue-white spark and its black and white wielder
settled lightly to the flagstones next to me.
	Rei Ayanami's scarlet eyes glittered at Atros as she bared
teeth just the slightest shade whiter than her face.
	"She won't have to," said Rei.  "When I am finished with you,
there will be nothing left for Anne to defeat."
	"My scheme here is destroyed.  I have no further quarrel with
you, Sithling," Atros snarled, pointing her saber at me.  "This one
has betrayed me and I must punish her."
	"Too bad," Rei replied coldly.  "-I- have a quarrel with
-you-, who sell the dreams and hopes of children for gold to finance
your masters' schemes of galactic conquest.  She can't have you until
I'm done with you."
	Atros stared at her, dumbfounded.  "You are -challenging- me,
child?  Me?  One of the Magnificent Ten, a product of the ICZER
system?  I could destroy this whole wretched planet - "
	" - But you'd rather just talk about it," Rei replied, her
tiny smile cold and spiteful.
	Atros's eyes narrowed and hardened.
	"You'll pay for that," she whispered, and began slowly walking
toward us.
	"Bear witness, Anne," Rei murmured to me.  "My test is at
hand.  Remember what I told you... what you must do."
	I nodded, put a hand on her shoulder, and tried to give her
what of my own strength remained.  She felt the power jump and smiled.
	"I won't need to do it," I whispered, then backstepped until
my back touched the wall and dropped into seiza to watch.  Near the
doors leading to the throne room, Ko-Enshaku stood impassive.  Watching.
Waiting for something, maybe.
	If he moved, I was going to have to find the strength somewhere
to stop him.  Given the way our previous confrontation had gone, I
didn't think I had much of a chance.
	On the other hand, I didn't think I had the strength to take
on Roger, either; the desperation-fueled iai that opened our duel was
a suicide gambit when I made it.

      /*  Juno Reactor  "Masters of the Universe"  _Shango_  */

	Atros stopped ten paces from Rei, settled herself, presented
her beam saber, and said, "I am Atros Eternas, Fourth of Project
ICZER.  In the name of the Magnificent Ten, I will destroy you!
Together!  Allegiance or death!  BIG FIRE!"
	Rei moved warily into her own position, her saber humming and
sparking against motes of dust in the air.
	"I am Ayanami Rei shar Atrados tal Vader," she said, "Padawan-
in-Shadows to His Divine Shadow Darth Anakyn shar Atrados tal Vader,
Grand Duke of Caladan, Chancellor of Santov, and Dark Lord of the
Ancient and Obtenebrated Order of the Sith; journeywoman of the Asagiri
Katsujinkenryuu; implacable foe of Big Fire.  I will not rest until
the twisted evil of Big Fire is extinguished from this galaxy...  and
my war begins here."
	Atros hissed between her teeth and wasted no more time on
preliminary posturing.  She threw herself into motion, crossing the
gap to Rei in an eyeblink, her scarlet saber leaving a streak across
my vision.

			    /*  00:28  */

	Rei faded back and parried, the energy blades crashing
together with a spurt of violet sparks.  They fenced that way for a
minute, saber on saber, like kendoka, feet shuffling back and forth
across the stone floor.  They weren't serious yet, just taking each
other's measure, and yet the speed and power of their strokes were
well beyond anything I'd ever seen in an exhibition, even at the
master level.
	Then Atros made a tiny slip, got just a bit too close, and
Rei's blade sought her head.  She moved back with the speed of
thought, never in serious danger, but her initial miscalculation meant
she failed to clear the blade by perhaps a millimeter, and a scarlet
burn crossed her right cheek just under her eye as she whirled away
from the strike.
	With her left hand she reached up and gently touched the burn.
	"Huh," she said, and swept the hand down and away.  As she did
an arc of glowing red power trailed in its wake, bolts of energy
shooting away from it like blaster bolts.  Rei never shifted her
stance, deflecting them at harmless angles with a single sweep of her
lightsaber.  If she was surprised that Atros could do that, she never
showed it.
	Snarling, Atros charged again, with that same incredible
speed.  This time Rei wasn't there to meet her; she'd slipped to the
side, dropping into a leg sweep.  Atros jumped over it, turned, but
Rei was on her off side; that hand was empty.
	Unfortunately, for Atros that didn't matter.  A bolt of red
power burst from her palm.  Rei moved aside not an instant too soon,
and the blip of power slashed through the space where her head had
been.  Her saber crashed against Atros's, blocking the black-haired
woman's attempt at a cross-strike.  Atros wheeled, kicking Rei solidly
in the middle and driving her back, and raised her hand for another
one of those powerbolts.
	Rei's other saber snapped from under her robes and burst into
life, deflecting the bolt into the ceiling, and she attacked.  Atros,
startled by the appearance of this second weapon, backed off, then
manifested a second saber of her own to counter with.  They
back-and-forthed like that for little while, until it became obvious
to Atros that Rei's skill with a blade was equal to her own.
	Then she gathered herself, leaped over a sweeping cut from
Rei's right-hand saber, and didn't come down.
	"What's wrong, Sithling?" Atros taunted.  "Can't you fly?"
	Rei glared up at her, eyes narrowed, silent.  I could feel the
Force ripple around her as her anger built - with my sensitivity to it
heightened by my battle with Roger, I could almost -see- it lapping
around her, a powerful and almost willful thing, not totally under the
control of the bright will at its center.
	Atros let her sabers vanish and began raining powerbolts down
from both hands, laughing all the while.  Rei took a half-step back
and parried them.  In her smooth, sure movements I could see lingering
echoes of the Dance of the Furious Wasps, a Katsujinkenryuu two-blade
kata for defense against archers.  She was holding her own, but not
accomplishing much, and Atros just kept laughing and increasing her
rate of fire.
	Rei seemed to realize that the situation would soon be
hopeless unless she did something to change the rules, and so she
did.  Her eyes closed, but she kept defending with the same quick
sureness as she marshalled the Force around her and shaped it.
	Then it burst out around her like a bubble, standing firm, and
the scarlet bolts of energy began bouncing away before they reached
her.  She couldn't maintain it long, not against the fierce volume of
fire Atros was putting down, but it bought her the half-second she
needed to snap her sabers together into the staff configuration I'd
seen before, shift her mental gears, and go back into action.
	Now her defense was really something to see.  She backed
slowly, carefully away, her footing always certain, as that two-ended
saber-staff whirled around her.  It crackled through the dusty air
with little lightning shows as it intercepted Atros's rain of deadly
energy, moving in her hands like a live thing.  Atros had backed her
almost to the edge of the ravine before Rei stopped, cocked her head
down, and smiled darkly.
	Then, with the saber-staff set before her, spinning so fast it
blurred into a blue-white ring that shed powerbolts like a shield, she
ran toward Atros at full speed, a battle yell welling up from inside
her to ring in the corners of the room.
	Ten paces from Atros she planted her feet and drove, leaping
into the air with the hand of the Dark Side underneath her, to emerge
above Atros's field of fire.  Before the startled Iczer could adjust,
Rei was descending toward her, black silks snapping around her, eyes
blazing, still yelling defiantly as she brought one blade of her
saber-staff down and around in a bright and searing arc.  At that same
instant, Atros thrust out a hand and released another packet of power.
	Blood and fabric flew in both directions, and both women
fell.  
	Atros crashed to the floor on her back and skidded ten feet,
coming to rest against the remains of a chair, then rolled back to her
feet.  One of her armored pauldrons was gone, and with it a good chunk
of the meat of her right shoulder.  She could still use the arm, but
it wouldn't be at full strength or speed, and it would hurt her.
	Rei tumbled in the opposite direction, looking like a bundle
of black rags, but she came up onto her feet as part of the same
smooth roll, back at the edge of the ravine, her staff stance intact.
For a second I thought she had gotten away with it.
	Then blood began to spatter the floor next to her left foot,
and I saw the bright scarlet spreading up and down that side of her
white inner robe.  Through the gaping rent in the fabric under her
left arm, white skin, stained silk and bright red blood shifted in a
pattern unreadable at my distance.  A glancing hit, perhaps, but a
terrible one nonetheless.
	Rei didn't even seem to notice.  She turned her head to spit a
mouthful of blood into the ravine, then broke into a run again with
only the barest of catches in her gait to betray the awful wound in
her side.  Atros went to meet her, re-manifesting her twin sabers.
They battled for a few seconds.  Rei's staff work was still blindingly
fast; she favored her injured side hardly at all as she fended off
both of Atros's furious blades, finally trapping them together.  Now
she could use that end of the staff to push Atros's sabers out of
position and sweep the other end up to finish it - 
	Atros realized what she was up to an instant before she could
do it, let the saber in her right hand melt away, and punched Rei as
hard as she could in her bloodied side.  I could hear the hissing
outrush of breath, almost -feel- the explosion of pain as Rei crumpled
to the floor, her concentration shattered by the sudden spike of
anguish.  Atros reversed the beam in her left hand and drove it down
as if she intended to pin Rei to the floor with it.
	But Rei wasn't out of tricks yet herself.  I knew what she was
doing down on the floor; I'd done it myself a couple of times, when
I'd been hurt.  She was drawing in the pain and using it to give
herself strength, channelling the outrage her body felt at having been
so abused into the power to lash out.  She rolled a little and drove
her left leg out; it thudded into Atros's body just below her beltline
with a very painful sound and folded her almost double.  The saber
flickered out as Atros's concentration broke, and Rei rolled away and
dragged herself to her feet, panting, her face pinched and yellow with
the pain.  She clutched at the wound with her left hand and started to
shiver uncontrollably.

			    /*  02:44  */

	The Dark Side howled around her, clawing at her, almost beyond
her control, and looking at her eyes, I could see why: Fear.  She had
realized that Atros's power was considerable, probably beyond her own
in strictly measured terms.  She doubted her ability to survive the
battle, let alone win it, and fear was rising up inside her - fear of
death, or fear of failure, or both.
	Atros saw it too, and, coughing slightly, sneered.
	"Do you yet see how hopeless your situation is, Sithling?" she
asked.  "My body is already healing from your puny strike," she went
on, nodding to her shoulder, which was, indeed, already beginning to
heal.  "Still, it served a purpose.  It reminded me that I was being
careless.  You will not have another opportunity."
	Glowing points of red light started swirling around Atros, as
though she had illuminated all the motes of dust in the air for a
ten-foot radius.  They orbited her, pulsing and dancing, her own
little constellation of scarlet stars, as she taunted Rei.
	Rei held her wounded side, her saber-staff drooping in her
right hand.  Her breath came in ragged gasps of pain and fear, her
eyes bleak as she watched the show surrounding Atros.  I didn't need
to try a telepathic probe to read the thoughts at the surface of her
mind:
	Maybe she's right - this was all for nothing.
	In an instant, Rei had gone from a poised, confident warrior
to a hurt and frightened child, rattling the bars of the cage behind
her eyes and crying for the mother she never had.
	I stared hard at her, desperate to cry out, make some sign,
but equally reluctant to do anything that might interfere with her
test.  I didn't think she would be able to accept outright help under
the circumstances, but I have discovered in my travels that ours is a
world defined by will.  Just by being there, by being -for- her, maybe
I could have some indirect influence... if I believed enough.
	She seemed to feel my eyes on her; she tore her bleak gaze
away from Atros's lights and her eyes met mine.

			     /* 03:52  */

	I felt an electric SNAP somewhere in my forebrain, a raw,
unvarnished communication straight from the synapses - as different
from regular telepathic contact as a surge of lust is different from a
passing notion of fondness.  Something crossed the distance between
us, something neither consciously requested nor deliberately sent, but
as inevitable and alive as lightning, and her eyes widened as though
I had reached out and physically touched her.
	Then her face hardened, all the pain and terror crystallizing
into something else, and the swirling song of the Force around her
cascaded down into a minor key.  When her eyes flicked away from mine
and back to Atros, they had something different in them, snarling from
deep behind the crimson irises, from the back of the brain where the
ancient part of all of us screams out its prehistoric hate for
anything that tries to make us stop living.  A chill ran up my spine
at the sight of it.
	"There is no way you can win," Atros said, calmly and
pleasantly, as the whirling lights around her slowed in their orbits.
She had missed the change in Rei's eyes, somehow.  She was deaf to the
Force and couldn't hear the change in its howling song.
	Rei's tight-pressed lips cocked into the smallest and cruelest
of smiles.  All around her, the air wavered, like the space above the
pavement on a hot summer day.
	The red lights slowed, slowed, stopped entirely... 
	... then smeared into bolts and leaped, a hundred of them,
streaking for Rei's heart like a hundred arrows loosed at once.

			    /*  04:02  */

	With a deafening, rending crash, the rippling air in front of
Rei -surged-, like a sleeper erupting up out of a nightmare, and the
flagstones of the floor tore away from their moorings and heaved into
the air, splitting and flying apart in a complicated dance that lasted
perhaps a quarter-second.  Rei's hair and robes whipped as though a
gale-force wind were blowing up from the floor beneath her feet.  That
instant hyperextended, grinding almost to a halt, as stones and
powerbolts lunged toward each other in a rush of almost cosmic
inevitability.
	A hundred powerbolts annihilated a hundred stones, and out of
the curtain of fireballs a black-white-red-blue screaming streak of
light exploded like a rocket, the song of the Dark Side pouring from
its throat.  Atros stumbled back, astonishment written all over her
face, and her sabers appeared barely in time to prevent Rei's
saber-staff from carving her into a dozen pieces in half a second.
	Her weapon moving almost too fast for me to see it, Rei rained
blows on Atros's defenses, yet this was not a blind berserker attack.
Though the rage and hatred pouring from her came in palpable, almost
nauseatingly intense waves, Rei had lost none of her form or technique.
Her strikes and counters were perfect and precise, blindingly fast and
unbelievably fierce, and Atros was being pushed to the limit just
keeping those two blue sparks of light away from her body.
	My heart leaped to see Rei's fighting spirit restored, then
froze as I realized what the shrieking song of the Dark Side that
surrounded her must mean.  This was too much - in overcoming her fear
she had gone too far, lost herself in her rage.  She wasn't fighting a
single enemy, keeping her anger proportional.  She was battering at all
of Big Fire, at the whole vast corrupt system which had spawned and
then discarded her in the name of its twisted science.  First she had
wanted her mother; now she wanted only death for the closest things to
biological parents she'd ever had.
	Ko-Enshaku had seen enough.  His scarlet cloak swirled around
him as he began to move.  I bolted to my feet, adrenaline giving me
new strength, and thumbed Kurenaikaze free for the draw.
	A thunderous barrage of scarlet blasterfire cut him off before
I could move, peppering the spectral samurai and forcing him to
abandon his charge, furl his cloak around him for protection, and pull
back.  Even before I turned, I knew there was only one place that fire
could have come from, and my heart leaped again.
	"HK-47!" Archie cried.
	Yes - his armor was dented and streaked, his right optic was
cracked and dark, and some kind of black fluid was still visible on
the shattered plating of his right side, but it was HK-47, all the
same, both of his heavy blaster pistols leveled and steady.
	"Statement: I'm not finished with you yet, meatbag," the droid
growled.
	Then he opened fire again, blazing away at Ko-Enshaku with a
ferocity mirroring that of his mistress's assault on Atros.
	The grey and scarlet spectre drew his sword and charged HK-47,
his spinning cloak deflecting the blasterfire.  It was the same move
he'd used to all but cut the droid in half and send him plummeting
into the ravine last time - but HK-47 wasn't going to fall for the
same trick twice.
	As Ko-Enshaku charged, HK kept shooting for a second or so,
then half-stepped back and holstered his blasters.  As he raised his
hands from the grips of the magnetically clamped weapons, they closed
into fists.  He pivoted aside from Ko-Enshaku's strike and rammed one
of those fists underhand into the charging spectre's midsection.  I
heard armor crack under the blow.  Ko-Enshaku's charge was not only
halted but reversed by the impact, carried backward as HK-47
straightened his arm in the follow-through.
	He managed to stay upright, but in the process his sword fell
from his hand.  He tried to retrieve it, but HK-47 was upon him before
he could grip it, driving a side-on kick into Ko-Enshaku's midsection
so powerful that his foot punched a hole in the grey samurai's
abdominal plate and vanished completely inside him.
	The phantom warrior staggered, still impaled on HK-47's foot.
Ko-Enshaku's surprise at HK-47's speed and power in such a condition
were obvious from his body language, if not his blank, grinning mask
of a face.
	"Observation: You assumed that this unit had no melee combat
capabilities," HK-47 said conversationally.  Then his voice darkened
considerably and he went on nastily, "Mistake number one, meatless
meatbag."
	HK-47 whirled on his planted foot, flinging the spectre free
to crash against the west wall, then leaped and seized him in his
machine-tool hands at throat and crotch.  Ko-Enshaku struggled feebly
as HK-47 raised him high, then brought him crashing down, dropping
into a half-kneel at the same time so that the small of Ko-Enshaku's
back was brought down on HK-47's left knee.  There was a terrible
splintering CRACK, and the spectral form spasmed once, twice...
	... and then fell apart, the segments of the old-fashioned
armor collapsing as though no one had ever been inside.
	I gasped, turned back to the main battle.  Ko-Enshaku's
termination had taken perhaps twenty seconds, and in that time, Rei's
assault had backed Atros almost all the way to the doors leading back
to the throne room.  Atros's heel hit the bottom-most of the three
steps leading up to the throne-room doors, and she stumbled, her guard
faltering.  The Dark Side exulted, the air thick with vicious delight
as Rei reared back her staff to strike, to end it, a hideous light
shining from her eyes.
	I was on my feet before I realized it, Kurenaikaze solid in my
hand, knowing what I would have to do next, wondering if HK-47 would
try to stop me or if he would understand.
	The tip of Rei's blade had begun to sear the skin of Atros's
throat before it suddenly stopped, stopped dead, as though time itself
had ceased, and the screaming chorus of the Dark Side ebbed away into
confusion.
	Rei stared down at her opponent, sick horror on her face, and
she drew back her saber's point a few centimeters, hands shaking.
	Atros looked up at her, startled and shocked.
	She recovered faster.
	The black-haired Iczer burst up from the floor, her left
hand's saber reappearing even as she moved.  The blade was still
growing as it struck Rei's saber-staff blade and knocked it out of
position.  The tip of Atros's beam struck Rei in the face just to the
right of her nose, crossing her right eye and obliterating it in a
horrible spray of scarlet and smoke.
	Rei screamed and reeled back, but she didn't drop her weapon
to clutch at the smoking wound.  She was already starting to recover
herself as she turned her backward stumble into a regrouping step and
centered her weapon, beams out to either side, ready to defend
herself
	a half-second
	too
	late.
	Atros's right-hand beam sprang forth, slashed up through Rei's
joined saber bodies, and punched straight through the center of her
body just below the gentle swell of her breasts, the scarlet bar of
light standing out from her back like some obscene flagpole.
	The two shattered, sparking halves of Rei's weapon fell away
in slow motion, their beams flickering and winking out.  She pitched
forward into Atros, her limp arms flung over the Iczer's shoulders
like a punch-drunk boxer's embrace, and blood flew from her gasping
mouth as her good eye went vacant and my heart went cold and empty.

			     /*  end  */

	"MASTER!" HK-47 cried, real horror and pain in his voice.
	Atros let her weapon dissipate, put a contemptuous hand on
Rei's shoulder, and shoved her away.  Rei stumbled back two paces on
legs as supple and agile as wooden stumps, then slowly crumpled to her
knees and settled back into a mockery of seiza, the blood still
running from the corner of her mouth.
	"NOOOOO!" HK-47 went on, drawing his blasters with lightning
speed.  He took a step toward Atros, his weapons drawing a bead.
	Atros turned and, with a contemptuous, negligent gesture,
blasted him.  Sparks and bits of slag flew from his already damaged
side as the bolt struck home.  With a hideous electronic noise, he was
bowled over backward and crashed down on the floor, a small fire
burning in the wound.
	With a tremendous effort, he rolled over.  His legs were
stiff, the signal trunk leading to them from his positronic brain
severed.  He tried to drag himself toward Rei with his arms, but the
strength was gone from them as well.
	"Ap... ap... ology," HK-47 grated as feedback sparked over his
armor, making him twitch.  "I've... failed you... master."
	Then his working optic went dark and he lay still, the
discharge ceasing as his power systems gave out.
	I felt my eyes stinging and knew that it wasn't just for Rei.
I had never seen an unemancipated droid as faithful as HK-47 before.
	I couldn't believe how thoroughly this had all come unhinged.
A moment ago we were winning.  Rei was wiping out Atros's defense as
if the Iczer weren't putting any up; HK-47 had returned from the
depths to reduce Ko-Enshaku to rubble; I had taken the head of a man
who had plagued the Duelists for nearly a decade.
	And now it was all over.  Rei was mortally wounded, HK-47 was
destroyed, and I was too exhausted to last more than a few seconds
against Atros once she turned her attention to me.  And judging by the
nasty smile she gave me, Atros was well aware of that.
	She turned back to Rei, grinned sardonically, and manifested a
new blade in her right hand.
	"If you beg me for mercy," she said, "I'll strike off your
head and make your death a quick one."
	I was gathering myself to interfere - a doomed effort, and I
knew it, but one that had to be made - when Rei's eye snapped back
into focus.  The Force, which had gone all but silent in the seconds
since her impalement, began again to mutter darkly.  Hearing it, I
froze, hope daring to steal back into my heart.
	"Well?" Atros demanded, her tone mocking.  "Anything to say
for yourself, child?"
	Rei looked back at her, the light returning to her eye, and
the Force growled and whispered.  Then the chorus began again, but
this time there was a difference.  Rather than a howling choir of
discord, directing Rei's actions through the conduit of her rage to
survive, to avenge, now the chorus sang as her anger directed -it-.
	And, kneeling on the broken stone floor with her life pooling
crimson around her, mortally wounded, obviously defeated, Rei Ayanami
did the most frightening thing I had ever seen anyone do:
	She smiled, baring her bloody teeth in a grin that was at once
beatific and terrible.
	"Watashi wa... Ayanami Rei shaa Atoradosu talu Veidaa," said
Rei in a hoarse but clear voice.
	Atros frowned as though sensing something she couldn't
identify; then her eyes flew wide in surprise and she raised her free
hand to her throat.  Her right arm strained, as though she were trying
to swing it and end Rei's life, but an invisible chain connected it to
the far wall, stopping its arc where she held it.
	Rei rose to her feet - slowly, but with the perfect smoothness
of an iai from seiza - and continued in her native tongue, >I am Padawan- 
in-Shadows to His Divine Shadow Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith.<
	Atros's eyes bulged with consternation and rage, her face
beginning to go purple, as she still struggled and strained to move
her frozen limbs.  Rei's one remaining scarlet eye bored into Atros's
as the Dark Jedi girl finished standing, moving as though she were not
wounded at all.
 	A familiar feeling stole over me, the same kind of instinctive
rightness that I had felt when we'd faced off against Big Fire's
cybernetic thugs in the alley in Danuu.  Something clicked, and even
though Rei was not looking at me, not devoting any of her attention to
me at all, I knew what she knew I had to do.
	She kept her eye locked on Atros's and said with a deadly
calm,
	>I will never beg for anything from the likes of you.<
	I reared back my arm and threw Kurenaikaze at Rei as hard as I
could.  Without looking, she turned her back to me, the movement and
the breaking of eye contact seeming to free Atros from the grip that
had held her frozen.  The Iczer sucked air, let it out in a snarling
scream, brought her blade around.
	Rei had finished three quarters of her pirouette and was
facing me fully just as Kurenaikaze's grip slapped firmly into her
hands.  She ducked under Atros's swing like smoke, still turning, then
came up to a full standing position -just- as the red beam passed.
Kurenaikaze swept in a glittering arc, an utterly perfect horizontal
cut, finishing with its point aimed almost due east, directly away
from me.
	Atros's blade winked out, and for a long, long moment, she
stared at Rei's face, her eyes full of the purest and most personal
hatred I have ever seen.
	Then the eyes glazed, blood gushed, and Atros Eternas's head
tumbled one way while her body crumpled the other.
	For a moment there was silence, save for the sound of Atros's
blood trickling across the stones, flowing away from Rei and pooling
at the bottom of the steps to the throne room.
	Kurenaikaze clanged to the floor, rolled off the edge of a
broken flagstone, and stopped, grip tilted slightly up.  Rei wavered,
then pitched forward.  I barely reached her in time, wrapping her
in my arms from behind.  She slumped, all her strength spent, a tiny,
limp bundle that cost me almost no effort to hold up.
	With an effort, she looked back at me over her shoulder and
smiled weakly.
	"Sumimasen," she murmured.  "I've d-dropped... your beautiful 
sword... "
	"Don't worry about that," I replied, slowly, gently lowering
her down.  "It's tough, and anyway, it's only a sword.  Swords can be
replaced."
	She lay with her head pillowed on my knees as I sat in seiza,
wishing for the first time in my life that, out of all the psi talents
a person could be born with, I had managed to come out with the anodyne 
factor.  Telepathic healers are the rarest of documented psionics; once 
upon a time I thanked the gods often that, if I had to be a teek and a
pyro, at least I -wasn't- an anodyne... but now I took it all back.
	Despite the pain she had to be in, Rei was smiling a serene
little smile.  I thought I knew what that smile meant, and the thought
brought hot, stinging tears to my eyes.  She looked up at me with her
one good eye as my tears spattered her face and made that smile a
little wider, as if to be reassuring.
	"No need for that," she whispered, closing her eye.  "I'll
be... all right.  Just... let me rest here... for a little while."
She raised her right hand; I took it in mine and nodded, head bowed,
hoping she was right, believing she was wrong.  I knew she was a
Detian, and I'd heard the legends about their durability, but I
couldn't believe that any person could be hurt as badly as she was and
survive, especially as exhausted as she must be.
	I saw motion out of the corner of my eye and turned my head,
My heart, already dipping low, sank entirely.
	Ko-Enshaku was rising from the dead again.
	The jumbled pile of random parts that he'd fallen into when
HK-47 broke his back was slowly, horrifyingly, levitating out of its
heap and putting itself back together again.  Boots, leggings, belt
and scabbards and swords, all came together like the collapse in
reverse; the same with his gauntlets, arms, and body.
	Then his helmet reassembled itself, surmounting the bulk of
his body, the red feather plume springing up like a reigniting flame,
and that hideous mask grinned at me.  Not only were all his armor
pieces back in the right places, they were undamaged, all the dents
and fractures inflicted by HK-47 gone as though they had never been
there.
	Ko-Enshaku's scarlet cloak swirled menacingly around him,
though there was no wind in the room.
	Then something equally amazing happened.  Off to my right,
HK-47's wreckage twitched, sparked, twitched again.  His dark optic
flickered, then glowed, and he slowly, painfully dragged himself to
hands and knees, then up onto one knee.  Only one of his blasters was
within reach; he picked it up in his right hand and leveled it.
	"Qu... query:" he inquired, his voice slightly stuttery and
off-tone.  "Wh... what does it take... to put you down... for -good-,
meatbag?"
	Ko-Enshaku, of course, was silent.  He drew his sword, which
had apparently wound up back in its scabbard while he was reassembling
himself, and advanced.
	HK-47 started to rise from his half-kneeling crouch, faltered
as though struck with pain, and fell, one hand stopping him from
falling onto his face while the other clutched at his wounded side.
Sparks and smoke burst out from within his smashed armor.
	I began to slip back, gently lowering Rei's head to the floor,
as Ko-Enshaku silently advanced.  He drew his right hand back, and
gleaming throwing irons sprouted between his fingers.  Out of time, I
did the only thing I had time to do, and hunched forward, crossing my
arms, covering as much of Rei with myself as I could.
	But then a voice, a voice like no other I have ever heard,
boomed out in the cavernous open space of the great hall, coming from
nowhere and everywhere at once:
	"Enough."
	-Something- fell from the rafter above us.  Something - and I
do not use this word lightly - terrifying.
	It was shaped like a man - a very large man, more than six
feet high and very broad-shouldered, clad in black from top to toe.
He had a black cloak that snapped like a flag as it fell, billowing
around him like wings, and underneath that was gleaming black armor.
	The armor was styled like that of a samurai of old, but with a
technological twist to it - every surface a smooth, interlocking plane
of metal, without laces, buckles or any visible attachments.  His head
was helmeted, a domed, slope-sided samurai's helmet not unlike
Ko-Enshaku's, but without plume or ornament of any kind.  His face as
a mask, too, but not a grinning parody of a man's face.  It was a
stylized technological death mask, part Reaper's face and part hazmat
visor, with the blank black eyes of Oblivion itself.
	I fought down a panic reaction at the sight of him.  He
frightened me like nothing else I'd encountered on this trip, not even
Roger, not even the hideous light in Rei's eyes when the Dark Side had
nearly taken her.  He seethed with dark power, as Rei had during the
last of her battle with Atros - but in him, there was the impression
that this was a mere sample of the power he could wield if he chose.
With my newly-heightened sensitivity to the Force, I felt his presence
fill the entire great hall like a fog, a palpable pressure.  It was as
though he were a bell, and his will its resonant tone, tolling in the
Force.
	The figure in black landed without a sound in the space
between us and Ko-Enshaku, his cloak falling around him.  He snapped
it back, freeing his arms, and held his black-gloved hands out to his
sides, palms facing the spectral warrior.  The message was clear:
	You will not pass.
	Ko-Enshaku stopped, then took a half-step back, throwing the
handful of irons in the same motion.  The man in black did not move at
all.  In mid-flight the throwing irons stopped as though they had
struck a brick wall, then clattered to the floor.
	Rei opened her eye and smiled at my astonishment, but said
nothing.  I watched as the black figure advanced on Ko-Enshaku, his
tread as unhesitating and inevitable as his fall from the rafter.  At
ten paces, he stopped.
	The two figures regarded each other for a long, silent
moment.  A slight wind blew through the shattered walls of the great
hall and ruffled their cloaks.  Their duel, I realized, had already
begun.
	Seconds passed with agonizing slowness as the warrior in black
and the red-faced demon gazed at each other, silent, motionless, locked
in a different kind of battle.
	Ko-Enshaku tensed almost imperceptibly; then his hand flashed
to his sword and he began to move, the blade singing from its scabbard.
	The figure in black burst into motion at the same instant, his
hand making an almost identical movement, and from him came the
distinctive hissing snap of a lightsaber springing to life, its scarlet 
blade casting a hellish glow across his death's-head mask.  Two paces
from one another, at a dead run, both warriors leaped.
	Except for the hum of the lightsaber and the ringing of the
steel blade, the two crossed in utter silence, landing at almost the
same instant.  For a long moment they remained where they had landed,
the man in black facing away from us.  Ko-Enshaku faced toward us,
only a few feet away, frozen in the follow-through stance of a strike.
	Then a gleaming crack appeared across his blade, about midway
between the tsuba and the tip, and with a bright, bell-like SPANG!,
half of the blade fell away, tumbled, and imbedded itself tip-down on
the floor.
	Ko-Enshaku's upper body slid forward at the beltline and
toppled after his broken sword, and then the entire horrible
assemblage crumbled away to dust and scattered into nothingness in the
wind.
	The black warrior extinguished his blade, turned, and began
walking purposefully toward us.  I forced myself not to cringe,
looking up at him from where I remained, still crouched defensively
over Rei.  She stirred, pushed weakly at my arms, and tried to sit up;
carefully, I sat her up, letting her lie back against me with the back
of her head nestled against my shoulder, so she could see what was
going on.
	Then HK-47 did another remarkable thing: he struggled to his
feet, limped to my side (one leg still dragging a bit), and bowed,
then sank down to seiza and kept his head respectfully inclined.
	"Hello, my lord.  I knew... you would be watching," Rei
whispered.
	"You knew - "  I stopped, gasped.  "That's your master?" I
asked.  "THAT'S Darth Vader?"
	She nodded, contentment on her face, and squeezed my hand.
	"Release... your fear," she said.  "You have... nothing... to
fear from him."
	Darth Vader stopped a half-pace from us, looking down with his
masked face.  Then he dropped to one knee, reaching to take Rei's free
hand with one of his.  Something inside his helmet gave a soft click,
and the death mask divided and slid away.  It revealed a face that was
rather handsome in a dark sort of way, with smooth skin the color of
new-ground coffee, eyes to match, heavy black brows, a thick black
mustache, and a close-trimmed, pointed beard.
	"Rei," he said.  It was the voice I'd heard booming from the
rafters, but softer, gentler.  Still the deepest voice I could ever
remember hearing from a human, though.
	"Lord Vader... " Rei whispered in return.
	"You have done well," said Vader.
	Rei smiled.  "Thank you, master."
	"No," Vader said with a smile, his teeth startlingly white
against the rich brown of his skin.  "I am your master no more, Ayanami 
Rei shar Atrados tal Vader.  There is nothing more I can teach you."
	He drew himself up into a more formal posture and said
something in a lilting, vowel-rich language, something which I was
later to learn meant approximately,
	"I convey upon you the level of Dark Knight of the Sith, with
all the responsibilities and privileges thereunto ascribed."
	I thought Rei's smile was going to break her face; it must be
unaccustomed to expressing such unreserved delight.  She turned her
good eye up to me, and a tear of joy welled up in it.
	"Thank you, Anne," she said softly.  "Without your help... 
your friendship... I could not... have done this."
	"You're... you're welcome."  I felt my throat clogging,
swallowed hard, tried for a weak joke with a wan grin: "What are
friends for, huh?"
	The smile diminished a little, but it stayed in place, as she
closed her eye and relaxed against me.  She seemed to become smaller,
somehow.
	"Hey," I said, shaking at her hand, which had slackened in
mine.  "H-hey, now, don't do that... come on, Rei... "
	Vader startled me by putting a hand on my shoulder, stopping
me from shaking her again.
	"She will recover," he said.  "This is not death; it is a
regenerative coma.  Detians do this when they are too badly injured to
go on.  She will emerge in a few days, weak and hungry, but in perfect
health."
	I stared at him, unsure whether to believe him.  He startled
me again by taking one of my hands in his and guiding my fingers to
one side of the hollow of Rei's throat, up under her jaw, and holding
them there.  Long seconds went by, and then, I felt it.  I blinked, my
eyes going wide, and looked into Vader's own as more seconds passed.
I counted my own breath.  Thirty seconds later I felt it again.
	And believed.
	The rush of relief set my hands to shaking, and I covered it
up by crossing my arms around her and hugging her unconscious form to
me.  A smile flickered across Vader's face.
	"She is a remarkable woman," he observed, and then said as
though he knew it to be unalterable fact, "She will surpass me in
every conceivable way."
	I looked at him, amazed, and to my astonishment, he winked at
me - just barely, and so fast I half-convinced myself I'd imagined it
before the sardonic laugh cut through the air and turned my heart to
ice again.
	We turned and looked at the same moment, and saw them standing
along the bottom of the shattered window bank in the south wall: five
figures silhouetted against the afternoon sky, with capes and scarves
and all manner of regalia fluttering around them in the breez.
	Only the one in the center could clearly be seen as he jumped
lightly down from the windows and stepped toward us: a tall, thin man
with thick black hair and a cruel face, his right eye and ear replaced
by obvious cybernetic parts.  He wore a dark blue business suit,
rather old-fashioned, and had a cigar clamped in the corner of his
mouth.  I'd never seen him before, but I knew him from pictures.
	Lord Alberto Casanegra de Nueva Castilla.  Shockwave Alberto.
Another of Big Fire's Magnificent Ten.  And that would make the other
four...
	... well, Atros -had- acknowledged that they were down to six.
	Hoo boy.
	Vader rose smoothly to his feet, the mask clicking back into
place over his face.  His hand went to his belt and held, but did not
draw, his lightsaber.
	Next to us, HK-47 rose as well, his movements surer now but
still not normal.  I certainly couldn't fault his determination,
though.  He was clearly game for whatever trouble Alberto and the
others wanted to bring, even half-dead as he was.  Hell, I thought,
maybe he just figures they can't kill him if Ko-Enshaku and Atros
couldn't.
	"Well, well, well," Alberto said mockingly.  "Isn't this
touching.  A graduation ceremony for our wayward daughter Rei,
complete with a congratulatory hug from her little friend."  He
sneered.  "I'm getting all choked up."
	"Statement: Back off, meatbag, or you'll get what they got,"
HK-47 replied, angling his free thumb at Roger's head and what was
left of Atros.
	The sardonic amusement vanished from Alberto's face and he
scowled, black-and-red energies swirling around his hands.
	"Do you think you can just walk in here, kill two members of
the Magnificent Ten -and- Lord Big Fire's most trusted aide, and walk
away again?" he snarled.
	I gaped at him.  "Roger was Magnificent Ten?!  You're lying."
	He laughed a cold little laugh.  "Atros didn't need to know
he'd taken Tsunami Gilbert's place."
	I lowered Rei gently to the floor and said quietly, out of the
corner of my mouth, "Archie, stay with Rei."  Archie gave me a
misgiving-filled glance, but he didn't argue; without a word he flowed
from me to her, wrapping her battered, punctured body in his soft
toughness.  I looked down at him.  He gave me a terse nod, his little
green eyes intense, and I knew he would guard her as he would me.
	Alberto was still talking as I slowly got to my feet and moved
into position between Vader and HK-47.
	"She thought he was just a puppet," he said, "taking the
leavings of her little telepath-harvesting project for some puny,
pathetic telepath uprising on the Rim.  His fighting form had such
potential."  He shrugged.  "But there's no use crying over spilt milk,
I suppose... "  His face hardened again.  "... Just so long as the
fools who spilled it DIE!"
	Vader and HK-47, though the latter looked barely able to
keep his feet, both made ready to move.  I reached my hand out and
Kurenaikaze flew to it, the grip slapping against my palm with an
audible smack in the hush of impending battle.  Alberto's power surged
up his arms, and the other four tensed, getting ready to leap from
their positions...
	... when the roof, the north wall, and most of the west and
east walls of the building exploded in a single thunderous blast of
cyan light, bursting outward as though a bomb had gone off inside the
great hall.  Rubble tumbled down the sides of the mountain, leaving
only a wrecked shell where the castle had been.  Alberto looked
shocked, then raised his hands as if to aim at a new target; a beam of
yellow light came from behind me, smacked him high in the chest and
sent him tumbling all the way back to the wall, where he fetched up in
an awkward sitting position, sprawled against the stone, his shirt and
jacket smoldering.
	Snarling, he wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of his
mouth and started to stand.  I felt a presence behind me, one so
familiar that I recognized and accepted it several seconds before it
occurred to me that it shouldn't, from what I knew, actually be
there.  By that point she'd walked past me, and my heart nearly
stopped.
	She strode past me, and HK-47 and Vader, with a feline tread
that was utterly unlike Vader's smooth warrior's walk but just as
inevitable, then stopped in front of us all and stood tall, the wind
blowing through the now-wide-open great hall snapping her black and
white silk raiments around her and blowing her long blue-silver hair
toward the west.  She was -still- the most beautiful woman I'd ever
seen, unchanged from the day when she'd gone in search of herself.
	Ifurita pointed one end of the ornate staff she carried at
Alberto and spoke to him in a voice of sharp command.
	"I don't know what this is all about," she said, "and I don't
care.  You will cease trying to harm these people.  You will leave
this place at -once-."
	"Or -what-?!" Alberto sneered, scrambling back to his feet.
	"Or I will kill you," Ifurita replied flatly.
	"Statement: -That's- the way to tell the meatbag, fellow
mechanoid!" HK-47 crowed admiringly.  Then, in a more businesslike
tone, he added, "Double-charging weapon, just in case."
	Ifurita and Alberto stared at each other for a few seconds.
I couldn't see Ifurita's face, but I knew its every angle and
expression by heart, and I could easily envision the flat, hard
dismissal in her cool blue eyes.  Alberto glared, opened his mouth to
speak, but Ifurita's razor-edged voice cut him off:
	"Don't be a fool, Alberto.  You -know- what I am."
	That stopped Alberto cold.  He stared hard at her for a
second, and then his good eye widened slightly in shock as he saw
-something- that made him take her seriously.  After a moment, he
looked past her at me.
	"Big Fire will not forget this," he informed me.  "You have
made an enemy here today."
	"Anyone who would take a freak like Roger as one of their own
was already my enemy," I told him.  "Go to hell."
	Alberto made an aggravated snarling noise and turned away.
"Let's go," he said, and the five of them were gone in the blink of an
eye.
	I let the tension out of my limbs.  Oh Goddess thank you... 
	I felt something touching my ankle, looked down to see Archie
butting my leg gently with his head.  Behind him, HK-47 had put away
his blaster and gathered Rei up in his arms.  I sheathed Kurenaikaze
and started walking, advancing slowly, unsteadily.  Ifurita stood
where she had stopped, watching the horizon, making sure Alberto and
his friends were gone.
	Then she turned and smiled at me, and everything I'd endured
since she left made her smile all the sweeter.  I wanted desperately
to hold her in my arms right then, but I wasn't sure my knees would
hold me up.  She solved the problem by coming and putting her arms
around me.
	"I see you haven't been able to keep yourself out of trouble,"
she observed wryly.
	"Well, you know me," I replied, trying to keep my voice light
so I wouldn't burst into tears.  "Always sticking my nose into
something."  I backed off a little, our hands sliding to each other's
shoulders, so I could see her as I told her, "You showed up at
-exactly- the right time.  How did you find me?"
	She grinned.  "Ru-ah told me when I asked," she said; then her
smile softened as she added quietly, "I told you I'd come back."
	I couldn't stop myself from crying after that, so I hugged her
again and did my best not to sniffle as I replied, "I know.  I know
you did."
	When I'd got myself under a bit better control I let her go,
dried my eyes as best I could on the sleeve of my jacket and asked her
softly, "Did you find what you were looking for?"
	She shook her head, but she was smiling as she leaned very
close and kissed me softly, long and gentle.  I was stunned.  It was
the first time she'd ever been overtly demonstrative with me in
anything like a public place, in front of strangers.  Her eyes
twinkled mischievously at me as she drew back and whispered,
	"No, Anne.  I discovered that I'd left it behind."
	My eyes filled with tears again, and I dashed at them
impatiently with my sleeve, replying in a weak voice, "Oh, stop -
you're going to make me cry again... "
	She smiled.  "No need of that.  I don't know what happened
here, but it looks like your side won."
	I grinned crookedly and nodded.  "Yeah... yeah, we did...
though it was touch and go there for a while."  I was just talking to
give myself time, but after that demonstration, I didn't mind at all.
	Now that I was certain of that most important information, and
reasonably sure that I could keep myself under control, I turned to
make introductions.  Vader was standing patiently a respectful
distance away, his mask retracted again, face impassive.  HK-47
stood beside him with Rei cradled in his arms like a child.
	"Ifurita, this is Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith," I said.
"Lord Vader, this is Ifurita."
	"I'm pleased to meet you, Lord Vader," said Ifurita.
	Vader actually -bowed- as he replied, "The pleasure is mine."
	"This is HK-47," I went on, putting a hand on one of
HK-47's pauldrons.
	"Statement: I am very pleased to make your acquaintance,
fellow combat unit."
	"And this... "  I regarded Rei's unconscious face for a
moment, then said, "This is Rei Ayanami, who got me into all of this
in the first place."
	Ifurita looked at her for several seconds, her face
unreadable; then she glanced at me and a smile stole over her
features.
	"She must be quite a girl," she said, and for the second time
that day I got a wink I wasn't expecting.  I felt my face get hot and
longed for a graceful change of subject - or some time alone with the
woman I loved most, to prove to her that it wasn't like -that- at
all...
	Luck was with me, for just then Lord Vader's ship, summoned by
remote, arrived.  With our wounded and our just plain tired, we climbed
aboard and headed for the Autumn Heart and some well-earned rest.

	The next hour is nothing but a blur in my memory.  We flew to
the Autumn Heart aboard Vader's flyer, a craft fully as ominous as its
dark master.  I vaguely remember a short and pointed argument with
Ru-ah about letting the one and only original and genuine Dark Lord of
the Frickin' Sith aboard the ship; I must have won, because aboard he
came.
	I remember putting Rei to bed in the guest cottage she'd used
the first time she'd stayed aboard, to be watched over by her former
teacher and her robotic guardian.  I remember HK-47 putting a hand on
my shoulder as I passed him, almost asleep on my feet, because the
gesture startled me awake for a moment longer.  When I looked at him,
surprised, he nodded silently, then took his hand away and returned to
his vigil.
	A droid with a heart, I thought to myself.  Bizarre.
	The other guest cottage was dark and silent, the redheaded
girl still asleep, the dark-haired boy dozing lightly in a chair next
to her bed, ready to spring awake at the slightest sign of turbulence.
He woke as Ifurita and I entered, gave us a smile, and told us
everything was all right and we needn't worry about the two of them
for a while.
	I must have fuzzed out again there, because the next thing I
remember is standing in front of the full-length mirror at one end of
my own bedroom, wondering who the hell the battle-scarred creature
looking back at me could possibly be.  My hachimaki had gone, and my
braid had come partly unraveled.  It must have been free during my
battle with Roger, but I'd never noticed it - for once.
	There was a reddish burn across one of my cheeks that I
couldn't remember receiving, and another crossing the knuckles of my
right hand.  They didn't hurt, even after I noticed them.  The thighs
of my jeans, where Archie hadn't covered me, were smeared with
drying brownish stains - Rei's blood.
	Poor Archie, I thought abstractly.  He must just be
-covered-... 
	Two hands that weren't mine came slowly, smoothly into my
field of view, gently lifting my shirt away from my shoulders.
	"Go to sleep, my love," said the voice of an angel in my ear.
"I'll take care of everything else."
	That sounded like the best offer I'd had in a long time, so I
took her up on it and blacked out on my feet.

	I woke to find myself alone and disoriented.  Daylight was
coming in through the slatted blinds of my bedroom windows, but that
told me little.  I turned my head to look at the clock on my
nightstand.  It told me I'd been asleep for fifteen hours.
	I could believe that.  I wanted to turn over and go back to
sleep for another fifteen, except I was hungry.  Very hungry.
	Reluctantly, I climbed out of bed, wincing and cursing as I
discovered that my body had chosen to reprimand me for abusing it so
over the last few days by stiffening into a wooden sculpture while I
slept.  Cursing, but trying to laugh at the same time, because I
always take a perverse pleasure in having worked my body so hard it
punishes me later for my sins.  I don't know why - perhaps I feel like
I'm banking up karma for a vacation - but I always do.  I hobbled,
naked, over to the mirror and took another look at myself.
	I might have saved myself the trouble.  A patchwork of
bruises, scratches, and the occasional small burn marked me from
hairline to ankles; only my feet didn't look like they'd just spent
the last few days letting various and sundry batter them with blunt
objects, psionic powers, and supernatural forces.  I made a mental
note to write a nice letter to the Converse people.
	The rest of me hadn't been that battered since the first week
of bokuto kata with Kaitlyn-sensei, before I'd figured out enough to
keep her from whacking me senseless all the time.  Now -there- was a
part of my misspent youth I didn't particularly care to re-live.
	I sighed at myself, went to my bathroom, and settled in for a
long soak, hungry or not.  I couldn't even eat until I felt a bit more
human.
	I might have dozed off again in the tub, but I couldn't have
been out very long before I noticed a presence in the room and opened
my eyes again to see Archie standing on the edge of the tub nearest
the window.  He was clean and fluffy, and looked a trifle put out;
apparently someone had given him a bath.
	"Morning," he said, and had a supplementary wash.
	"It's afternoon," I told him.
	He paused in his hygiene long enough to make a kind of feline
shrug.  "Always morning someplace," he said, and I had to admit he had
a point.
	There was a soft step behind me; I craned my neck to see
Ifurita entering the bathroom.  She'd changed from her traveling
clothes into a simpler outfit - well, simpler for her, anyway.  I
never could get her to wear spacer's coveralls, useful pockets or not.
She said once that she'd grown so accustomed to being decorative in
her millennia of service to her Mandalorian creators that she felt
self-conscious in anything less than a decently dressy silk shirt and
trousers.  I'd have loved her in a plastic raincoat or a burlap sack,
but what the hell, she liked to dress up, let her dress up.
	I grinned, more to myself than to her, as I reflected with
faint regret on how wet and wrinkly I was going to get that expensive
shirt in a minute.
	She smiled, and I settled back into the tub and let my head
fall back against the cushioned rim.  I decided life was generally
good and so worth living, even without any food within reach.  Then my
eyes snapped open and I looked again, not having to turn so far now,
since she was almost even with the tub.
	She was carrying a tray, upon which, at a quick estimate,
appeared to be everything edible on board.
	"A second ago," I told her, "I was thinking that only one
single thing was missing from my life before I could call it perfect,
beyond any possible improvement."
	"And?" she asked, playing along.
	"And then you brought it," I said, grabbing a sandwich from
the tray before she had a chance to put it down and consuming it
without bothering to examine its contents.
	"Well," she said with feigned wryness, "at least I serve some
constructive function."
	"When I finish eating all this - and I will finish eating all
this - you know what I'm going to do?"
	"I'll tell you one thing you're -not- going to do," she
replied with a serene little smile.
	"What's that?" I asked.
	"You're not going to get this shirt wet," she replied, then
pulled it off over her head and tossed it out into the hall.
	"Killjoy," I said, seized a fork, and began dismembering the
salad.
	"Gevalt," said Archie, and excused himself via the window.  I
wondered where he learned that word.

	Later, as we walked across the meadow toward the guest cottages,
I remarked to myself that life was a thing of great excellence and most 
certainly not to be missed.
	Rei's cottage was dark and quiet.  HK-47 was standing guard by
the doorway to the bedroom, just as he had by my own doorway that one
night.
	I noticed that he was standing straighter, and furthermore
that both his optics were working again.  A closer look showed that
the terrible gash in his side was mostly gone, only a minor cut in the
armor plate showing; the metal was healing almost like a person's
flesh would.  Some kind of nanotechnological reconstruction system,
perhaps?  I'm no engineer, but what else could rebuild armor plating
that way?
	"How are you doing, HK-47?" I asked.
	"Answer: This unit is functioning at 73% of optimum
efficiency, and regaining approximately five percent per hour," HK-47
replied briskly.  "Automatic repair systems are functioning at full
capacity."
	"You're quite a piece of work," I observed.  "Who built you?"
	With a very human shrug, HK-47 replied, "Answer: I do not
know, Captain.  Ninety-two percent of my memory prior to my current
master's ownership has been erased."
	"Huh.  That's too bad," I said.
	"Agreement: Indeed.  Most unfortunate.  The master has assured
me that my memory will never be wiped again while she owns me."
	I nodded and went on into the bedroom.  I'd gotten so used to
the marvels of HK-47 by now that his powers of recovery didn't really
surprise me much.  Ifurita gave him a long, curious look before
catching up to me.  I wondered what she thought of him.
	Darth Vader was sitting on the floor next to the bed,
perfectly still, like a sculpture.  His armor was gone, but it was too
dark in the room to see what he was wearing in any detail.  As we
approached, I felt the Force quiver as he assessed us without visibly
reacting.  Then his eyes slid open, and he smiled, his teeth flashing
in the twilight of the shuttered room.
	Rei lay on her back, still and composed, arms at her sides,
the covers drawn up to her throat.  The ruin Atros's beam had made of
the upper right side of her face was covered with a bandage the size
of my flattened hand, swathing her face from nose to ear to hairline.
Vader rose smoothly to his feet and stood at my side as I looked down
at her, then glanced questioningly at him.
	"Regeneration is proceeding well," he rumbled softly.  "I'm no
expert, but I suspect she will awaken in forty-eight to sixty hours."
	I reached out and gently touched her left cheek.  Her skin was
cool, cooler than my instincts said it should have been, but not
cold.  I slid my fingers down to the carotid, waited, smiled.
	"Incredible," I said, and brushed some hair back from her one
closed eye.  "I'd like to discuss something with you, Lord Vader," I
told the Sith Lord.  "We should probably go outside so Rei can have
quiet."
	"I doubt Rei would be bothered by a brass band," Vader replied
with a touch of amusement in his seismic voice, "but as you wish."
	The three of us went outside, passing HK-47 again to do so.
Out in the light, I had the opportunity to get my first good look at
the Dark Lord.
	He was very tall, several inches over six feet, and powerful
but not overbuilt, managing to seem even taller than he was because of
his lean solidity.  He was dressed in shiny black boots with bright
silver buckles down the sides, thick black trousers with red striping
up the outer seams, and a black tunic that appeared, by the way the
light played on it when he moved, to be made of some velveteen
material.
	Over this he wore Jedi-style robes: a sleeveless, open-fronted, 
blood-red pleated inner robe tucked into the wide black belt around his 
waist and reaching to the tops of his boots, and a heavy black hoodless 
cloak fastened at his throat with a silver clasp, its edges currently
thrown back over his broad shoulders to free his arms.  Not many men
could wear an outfit like that and not look totally corny, but the air
of immense dignity that surrounded him made it possible.
	I studied his profile, the first time I'd seen his face
without that bulky helmet obscuring it.  I thought he was quite
handsome if you liked that kind of thing, with a lean, high-cheekboned
face, sharply pointed nose, heavy black mustache, and a strong jaw
adorned with a neatly trimmed vandyke beard.  His eyes were dark and
intense under heavy brows, but they were not without mirth.  His skin
was the color of milk chocolate, burnished and healthy, and his long,
straight hair, pulled back into a ponytail reaching to the middle of
his back by a leather strap with a silver clasp, was black as night,
shot with a trifle of silver at the temples.
        He might have been thirty, save for the silver in his hair and
the finely forming crows' feet at the corners of his eyes.  Of course,
he also wasn't strictly -human-, which would completely invalidate any
musing about his age.  Between his skin tone, his features, and his
clothes, he gave my admittedly fanciful imagination the impression of
a Moorish warrior prince from a storybook of Old Earth.  He wouldn't
look at all out of place on the back of a huge black horse, waving a
bright, curving sword and bellowing a challenge as he galloped across
the sands of the twelfth century, meeting the Crusaders in battle for
the Holy Land.
	As we topped the rise overlooking the pond, I shook off that
curious image with an effort, turned to him and said, "I'd like to
leave Jisatsu immediately, Lord Vader.  My next planned destination is
Naboo.  If you have no objections?"
	Vader frowned.  Uh-oh, I thought.  He has an objection.
	Then he said, "I don't believe I ever got your full name,
Captain."
	I stared at him, then blushed as I realized he was right.  I'd
introduced Ifurita, but never introduced myself.  Rei hadn't been in
any shape to do it, and HK-47 wouldn't think it a droid's place to be
making introductions.
	"I'm sorry," I said to him, and bowed.  "I'm Anne Cross, of
the Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu."
	Vader blinked, bemused.
	"It is a small galaxy," he observed.  Stepping back a bit to
give himself room, he performed a courtly a bow as I've ever seen a
man make, and intoned, "I am Darth Anakyn shar Atrados tal Vader,
Grand Duke of Caladan, Prince Regent of the late Atlantean Empire of
Stars, Chancellor of Santov, Chief Warlord to His Dread Excellence
Quevas XIII of Santovasku, and Dark Lord of the Ancient and
Obtenebrated Order of the Sith; and I am at your service, Captain
Cross."
	"(Everybody's got more titles than me,)" I muttered.
	"(Let me try him,)" Ifurita suggested impishly.
	"(Ohh no.  I'm not listening to that whole speech about the
Plenipotent Star-Shattering Omnigovernance of First, Second, and Third
Mandalor again.)"
	"(Suit yourself... )"
	"It would please me to accompany you to Naboo," Vader went
on.  "Rei needs time and peace to recover; once she wakes from her
coma, she will still be weak for some time.  And there is the problem
of the other girl, and the boy.  Something will need to be done about
the boy... "  He scratched at his chin, musing.
	"His psychic talent is incredible," I agreed.  "He'll need
help controlling it... and forgive my bluntness, Lord Vader, but
-your- help is not what he needs."
	Vader glanced at me, then nodded gravely.  "There is nothing
to forgive.  You're quite right.  My path is the right one for only a
very few, and Shinji Ikari is not among them.  Hopefully he can find
guidance among the Jedi of the Light."
	I thought back to my own training, nodded slowly.  "Or perhaps
somewhere else," I said, slowly.  "There's always options.  Thank you,
Lord Vader - I'll go and get us underway now."  I paused, then tossed
him a smile that was a cross between hopeful and rueful.  "And then,
if you wouldn't mind, I would like to hear how you got here from the
place you have in all the history I've ever heard about you."
	He chuckled. "It is something of a long story," he observed.
	"Yeah, well," I said, doing math in my head, "we've got some
time before we reach Naboo, I'm too sore to spar much right now, and
Rei isn't going to be much for conversation for a while, I think."
	"Very well," he agreed.
	Feeling very cheerful indeed, I headed off to the bridge to
get us underway - and then start composing my reports on all this for
JIIS and the Experts of Justice.

	Four days out, Rei was feeling well enough to do a little
light sparring, and Shinji felt comfortable enough with Asuka's status
(resting quietly) to oblige her.  Given Rei's condition, he'd be more
than enough for her to handle - but she did surprisingly well,
considering she'd been all but dead just a few days before.
	Vader and I stood for a few quiet minutes looking out across
the pond toward the glow of light from the dojo, watching the shadows
within as they moved back and forth, back and forth.
	I smiled.  "You know, you're wrong about Rei," I said to
Vader.
	He looked puzzled.  "Eh?"
	"Back on Jisatsu, you said that Rei will surpass you in every
conceivable way... but you're wrong."
	Vader scowled in slightly confused annoyance.  "What do you
mean?" he rumbled.
	I kept my face perfectly straight as I looked back at him and
said, "She'll never be taller than you."
	He stared at me for a long, long second; then the white slash
of a grin split his face, and he threw his head back and guffawed.  He
had a good laugh, big and deep and hearty, a laugh he wasn't ashamed
of in the slightest.
	When he finished laughing, he looked back across at the dojo
with the smile still on his face and said, "No... I suppose you're
right.  But in every meaningful way, Rei will be my superior."  He put
his hands on the porch railing and leaned forward slightly, the smile
on his face becoming kind of dreamy and distant.
	"One day, -I- will call -her- master," he mused in a quieter
tone, and he didn't sound as if the notion bothered him at all.
	Two days later we were on Naboo.


	/*  Train  "Drops of Jupiter"  _Drops of Jupiter_  */

		     Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
			      presented
			UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES
			  FUTURE IMPERFECT:

		    -=WARRIORS OF THE OUTER RIM=-
				Blades

			       starring
			      Anne Cross
			     Rei Ayanami
			    Roger Tremayne
			    Atros Eternas
				 and
				HK-47

				 with
			     Shinji Ikari
			 Asuka Langley Soryuu
				Archie
				Ru-ah
			    Donald Bailey
			      Ayla Ranzz
			       Ifurita
				 and
			     Darth Vader

			    special guests
	 The remaining members of Big Fire's Magnificent Ten
			featuring Lord Alberto

				 and
			      Ko-Enshaku
			      as itself

			written & directed by
			 Benjamin D. Hutchins

			 second unit director
			      Anne Cross

	    some characters based on characters created by
		  Hideaki Anno & Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
				 and
			     George Lucas
			    (among others)

     with another nod to the KOTOR teams at LucasArts and BioWare

			 E P U (colour) 2004