Ayli hadn’t stolen the speeder she was driving. Stealing something implied that someone owned it and, given that it wasn’t sufficiently locked down to prevent her hotwiring it, she had to assume that no one owned this particular bike. Some planets had individual scale public transportation after all, and as long as Ayli didn’t look into the laws in Haliph City she wasn’t breaking any of them.

That was definitely how it worked.

She was sure.

The sirens in the distance? Couldn’t be for her.

Nor was the shouting she heard when she rocketed away on the speeder likely at all related.

The city was having a bad day after all. Droids had blown up in a bunch of different places.

Places that she’d been admittedly.

But still.

And then there were the assassin.

Only one of whom was probably dead. 

Another might or more not have a fractured skull.

But he’d survive.

On the back of the speeder, Ayli’s new friend Monfi had his arms around her waist in a vice grip and his eyes shut as hard as they could be.

That did not make navigating traffic at high speeds any easier.

It also did not include Ayli to reduce her speed by any amount.

She was on a rescue mission after all.

She couldn’t claim to have a deep connection with Archivist Bopo but they’d known each other since Ayli attended her first classes in xeno-archeology. As with most of Ayli’s academic associates, they’d lost touch after she graduated, and had kept in touch more via following each others work than through direct correspondence, but Ayli had remembered Bopo fondly enough to suggest her as a source to check in with when Nix announced she wanted to search for other Force traditions.

Which meant Bopo was in trouble.

“Kelda, have you regained enough strength to manipulate physical objects yet?” she asked, knowing that her Force Ghost friend would be able to hear here despite the roar of the wind and the fact that there wasn’t really even space for two on the speeder, much less three.

“You’d like me to get the ship prepped for launch?” Kelda asked. Because Force Ghosts had rather good intuition. Who could imagine?

“Yeah. I’ve got the departure documentation loaded in the buffers. If you can send that and start up the engines as soon as I get to Bopo’s there might be some chance we get out of her without any more attacks.

“My associates have that covered,” Monfi said without opening his eyes.

“Do you think that, or do you know it?” Ayli asked, sliding the speeder under a transport lifter because stopping at an intersection was simply not on the agenda.

“The kill order that brought the assassins in was logged by one of Paralus’ minions. They’ve been neutralized,” Monfi said.

“You mentioned that before, which means you’re not working alone?” Kelda asked.

“Horizon Knight’s don’t. We are frequently outmatched by the things we hunt, so we hunt in groups.”

“Not unlike the Jedi,” Kelda said. “We would bring our Padawans along on safe missions, and other Knights if we sensed danger in the offing. Or, if we were feeling particular foolish, we would rush off alone to confront the problem.”

“A Horizon Knight’s mission almost always involves danger, so our apprentices follow us no matter what end we pursue,” Monfi said.

“Which was something else the Jedi didn’t approve of as I recall,” Kelda said. “Then a mere thousand years later, they let themselves be embroiled in a war and dragged their children along with them.”

“Wait, are you saying you have kids here? In Haliph?” Ayli asked, gritting her teeth at the extra time it would take to collect them all.

“My apprentice has long since flown off on his own,” Monfi said. “My partner on the other hand has both of her apprentices here, and the three of them tracked down Paralus’ associate, a man named Bargus Brell,  already. If they hadn’t the tank you noticed earlier would have been a problem long before now.”

As though the Force took some unholy glee in disputing statements like that, Monfi had no sooner said those words than the building in front of the speeder bike exploded outward as a droid operated tank burst through it and began blasting its main cannon at that.

Ayli’s lightsaber was in her hand before she was consciously aware of it.

She knew she blocked two of the tank’s blasts, mostly because she was conscious of the choices she made for where the ricochets would land.

Just because she was having a terrible day, didn’t mean anyone else needed to have their lives ruined or cut short by Imperial cannon fire.

Ayli shook her head.

It wasn’t the Imperials who were after her.

The Empire was dead.

The Rebellion had cut it’s head off, and burned every bit of its body they could find.

In the moment it took her to remind herself of that fact, Monfi had snapped to action, opening his eyes and extending a hand towards the tank. It didn’t explode like the (much smaller) recon droid had. Instead it’s main barrel simply bent downwards by the width of a handspan.

Which was enough to completely ruin the firing channel.

Ayli hoped the droid pilot would fail to process the damage properly and blow itself up with the next attempt to fire the main cannon, but it didn’t.

Instead four blisters rose on the sides of the tank and extended the barrels of the smaller secondary cannons to continue the onslaught.

Ayli knew how fast those could fire and the sort of damage they could inflict on unshielded bodies. Whether she’d be able to parry the onslaught with her lightsaber was something she wasn’t inclined to research however, so she banked the speeder into a hard turn, leaving the main road to crash down alleys in search of a more sheltered path to her destination.

“Should I still prep the ship?” Kelda asked.

“Definitely. We’ll be departing with a crew of three, not counting you.” 

“You mean five do you not?” Monfi asked.

“Nope. Three. You, me, and Bopo,” Ayli said.

“And my partner and her apprentices?” Monfi asked.

“You have a ship. We may need a backup. They should get that in the air. You can send them our coordinates and heading as soon as we have one.”

“Reasonable, but who is the third who’ll be departing with us?” Monfi had closed his eyes once more.

“Bopo’s a friend of mine from school,” Ayli said. “I’m also hoping she’ll have some idea where my wife might have gotten herself too.”

“As a Jedi you should be able to sense that directly shouldn’t you?” Monfi asked.

“I’m not a Jedi, but yes, I should.”

“Oh. I understand the question about Paralus attacking our connections,” Monfi said.

The alleyways weren’t designed to support traffic at the same speeds as the main thoroughfare. In Ayli’s view that was a mark in their favor since her pursuers would have a harder time keeping up.

That the narrow gaps of alleys and the sudden ninety degree turns meant that she had to focus too much on her piloting to think about what might have happened to Nix was also a blessing.

“I don’t understand though. They had to have neutralized Brell. If not we’d be swarmed with assassins by now,” Monfi said. “And I don’t sense anyone still connected to the contract.”

“Your partner did her job,” Ayli said. “Bargus Brell is well connected but he’s an idiot when it comes to tech.”

“The droid were under the control of the assassins though,” Monfi said.

“Some of them. Maybe most of the original batch,” Ayli said. “Bargus has a droid servitor though. A decommissioned HK bot. Give it the right commands and it could hack all sorts of bots around the city, from the taxi droid that took the first shot at killing me to the tank who just crashed through a building about three blocks back.”

“But someone has to be controlling the droid, don’t they?” Monfi said.

“Normally? Yeah. Droid that can kill people are kept on a tight lockdown. Droids that can control other droids to kill people are melted down to scrap on sight.”

“Which would suggest they wouldn’t be the problem here.”

“Yes. Except that I can’t sense the person who’s the problem here. Or even that there is a person whose the problem, which means…” She braked the speeder so hard its tail end flipped over its front as the spiraled out of the alleyway, dodging the cannon shot which had been waiting for them and expecting movement that was in the same star system as sanity.

“Which means Brell and his droid are both trying to kill us,” Monfi said a moment after Ayli twisted them upright into a landing which didn’t entirely destroy three parked cruisers.

 “Not the HK,” Ayli said. “That’s the access point. It’s too well known here. Whatever company that tank belongs to definitely has security in place to keep an HK out of their systems. Paralus must be working with a unrestricted droid of his own. That’s probably who brought the kill order to Brell in the first place.”

“A droid wouldn’t be any faster to get here than Paralus himself would though,” Monfi said. “Unless Paralus needed to be somewhere else though. Or couldn’t come here at all for some reason.”

“Just to verify, even if he’s good at hiding himself, there’s nothing special about a Lich that let’s them hide the Dark Side they exude right?” Ayli asked, splitting her focus despite it being a monumentally bad idea.

Well, monumentally bad for someone who wasn’t as good a pilot as she was.

“Not that the Horizon Knights have ever discovered,” Monfi said. “I don’’t think that helps us though. The Dark Side exists everywhere people do.”

“That’s true, but I’ve had a lot more experience than I’d prefer with Dark Side monsters. Even when you can’t see them, you can tell they’re around if you know how to listen for them.”

It was not as easy as Ayli suggested, nor was she practiced enough with the Force to be sure she could detect the monsters the Dark Side spawned reliably.

Except in this case.

Paralus Stahl was focused on her.

Something she’d done had forged a connection between the two of them. A connection that had allowed him to track her across the stars. A connection which let him foresee her actions to the point where he could have agents in place the moment she landed on a new world.

Connections, however, go in both directions.

She didn’t know who he was. Not really. Or what she’d done that placed her in his sights.

But she knew he was looking for her, and so she looked back.

Casting her awareness into the Force while driving at twice the posted speed limit down crowded streets wasn’t difficult. It didn’t require a special effort of will, or a special degree of talent. It simply required trust.

Trust in the Force.

She’d always listened to it when she was behind the controls of a vessel. It had taken being possessed by a Sith Force Ghost and a year of training under the tutelage of a trio of very dear instructors, but that had allowed her to hear more than distant whispers of the Force.

As her awareness rose outwards towards the stars seeking the heart of the malice which was directed at her, she gave control of her body over to the Force almost entirely.

Where once the Force had been a distant echo, from within the trance she embraced she caught glimpsed echoes of the world around her and piloting through it with perfect awareness of what was around her and what would be at every instant of the course she’d chosen.

The greater part of her awareness though was swallowed by the void between the stars.

Within the endless dome of the sky there were countless lives and distance on a scale to dwarf all understanding. Deep inside that though, she could feel the hate that sought her.

Hate that had an all too familiar home.

From across the light years, Praxis Mar was at war, and it was calling her home.