Tournament at Tatooine
by
Bobby Derie
by
Bobby Derie
Empires and republics rise and fall, but Mos Eisley remained
a hive of scum and villainy. Eiven Task followed his guide through the maze of
the spaceport, past dealers in narcotic spices and stolen droids, down back alleys
where corpses piled up until the weekly removal crews came by, the ones on the
bottom already gummy and half-mummified from the dry heat, and finally to one
of the many illegal hangars that dotted the town. A pair of guards—a Rodian and
a droid—had their hands on their blaster rifles as Task’s guide made a sign,
and didn’t relax as Eiven passed them into the half-hidden freight elevator.
The rusty door to the cage shuddered shut, and they began to descend.
“When we meet Oona, let me talk.” his guide said. Milos
Sothas was tall even for a muun, with chocolate-brown skin and kind blue-grey
eyes and a spare frame. His high forehead free of hair save for a fringe of
grey about his ears, and a close-cropped grey mustache and beard complete his
long face. He wore the desert garb of an Antarian Ranger, all sandy browns and
yellows and with a wide-brimmed floppy hat, but hanging from his belt was as
finely-crafted a lightsaber as Task had ever seen—small enough to wield
comfortably in a single hand, with the slightest of curves at the base of the
handle.
Eiven himself was a head shorter than the tall muun, about
average for a human, but more imposing. He wore a smooth white armor and helmet
modeled after the Royal Imperial Guard, patched and repaired in places where it
had been damaged in battle, and over that a reversible hooded clock, the
outside white, the inside black. In his right hand he carried a
meter-and-a-half tall staff of phrik alloy. With a flick of a finger, the
recessed control knobs at either end would transform the weapon into an even
deadlier lightsaber pike.
In time the dark deepened, the desert heat gave way to cool,
dry air, and the elevator rattled to a stop. The cage door struggled open,
revealing a reception hall and more guards—again, evenly distributed between
droids and aliens. Through the floor, Eiven could feel the movement of a crowd,
the stamping of feet and shouting in a dozen alien tongues. The muun took the
lead stepping off the elevator, confident in his long-limbed stride as he
walked through the hall to where Oona the Hutt lay.
Young by Hutt standards, Oona was perhaps three meters long
from neckless head to the tip of tail, and still quite mobile. The Hutt’s
brown-grey hide had a mottled appearance, but its vast eyes were violet rimmed
with yellow. A grey protocol droid painted with coiling krayt dragons stood at
Oona’s side, and the droid greeted them in Basic as they approached. The muun
replied in Huttese, a language Eiven had yet to learn, though he picked out a
few words—including wala-wala “he who
throws off the betting.” Task let the muun do the talking, but it was the
protocol droid that addressed him first.
“Mighty Oona agrees to allow you to participate in the
tournament. Master Sothas says you have been informed as to the rules and the
stakes. You must pay the entrance fee now.”
Reaching into the pouch that hung at his left side, Task
withdrew a four-sided pyramid of dark crystal—a Sith holocron he had stolen
years ago. A mangy one-eyed Bothan and a combat-scarred battle droid came up, a
flat-topped floating platform between them. The protocol droid took the
holocron from Eiven’s hand and placed it on the platform; immediately a
spherical energy shield enveloped the whole device.
The muun’s hand caught Eiven on the shoulder, and guided him
toward a door away from Oona.
“Well, the good news is, you’re in.” Sothas said. “The bad
news is the tournament is due to start soon. As an unknown and a late entry,
that’s going to throw the betting off. So you’re going to be in the first
match.”
The door opened, and now Task could hear and feel the noise
and movement of the crowd, which was arranged in galleries around a
flat-bottomed bowl with steep, curving sides topped with translucent
force-shields to keep the crowd back. In the pit was largest wookiee Eiven Task
had ever seen, a white-furred albino carrying a massive long-hilted lightsaber
with a meter-a-half long blazing green blade.
“…which starts in twenty minutes. Good luck.”
*
“No blasters or other ranged weapons. No Force lightning or
tricks! This is a contest of martial skill from some of the greatest
Force-adepts in the galaxy…” the Toydarian announcer worked up the crowd with
his spiel. Floating near the ceiling were seven holocrons, each in its own
energy-shield. Eiven Task examined his opponent.
The albino wore the robes of a Jedi, and stood well over two
meters tall. The thick hilt of its massive lightsaber was half a meter long,
and combined with the meter-and-a-half long blade made for a weapon as long as Eiven’s
own lightsaber pike when ignited. Combined with the wookiee’s considerable
height and longer reach, and Task knew he was already at a disadvantage.
“…to the death!” the Toydarian shouted and flitted off. The
wookie settled into an Ataru stance lightsaber held in both hands and his body
turned slightly to the side. Eiven ran straight at the wookiee, his staff held
low and parallel to the ground. In response, the wookiee stepped forward,
bringing his lightsaber down for a slash that should have split the human in
two, but at the last moment Task dodged aside, then brought his staff down on
the wookiee’s wrists with as much strength as he could bear. Surprisingly, the
wookiee dropped the lightsaber, the blade flickering out before it hit the
ground.
Then the massive furry paws came up and hit Eiven in the
chest, and he realized that he’d just decided to get in close to a fight to the
death with a wookiee. The blow sent the human sprawling and knocked the staff
out of his hands. With a pair of long strides, the wookiee Jedi was on him
again in moments, those massive hands clamping on either of his arms and
drawing Task in for a bodylock. With his arms pinned to his sides and his
helmet pressed against the wookiee’s chest, all Eiven could see was fur—but he
felt the wookiee’s hands meet behind his back.
Task’s legs scrabbled for purchase, but the best he could do
was to wrap them around the wookiee’s lower torso and pressed his helmet as
hard as he could into the wookiee’s sternum. Gigantic arboreal humanoids as
they might be, even wookiees need to breathe. They stayed like that for what
seemed an eternity…maybe thirty seconds. When Eiven heard the crinkle as part
of the armor across his arms and shoulders began to deform, he knew it wasn’t
going to work. Taking a gamble Task let his body go limp. The wookiee Jedi,
not expecting this, relaxed his grip slightly as the human became dead weight
in his arms. Eiven used the moment to kick the wookiee as viciously as he could
between the legs.
The wookiee howled and dropped him. Task found his
lightsaber pike. The albino was still half clenched over as Eiven ignited the
silver-white blade. A moment later there was the smell of burning hair and the
Jedi’s head bounced against the floor.
*
Even as the crowd roared and stamped their feet, betting for
the second match began. Eiven Task was in the locker room. Colored displays
showed the changing odds, and Eiven noted his own ranking had suddenly
increased. The display flickered. “Mighty Oona bids you to prepare yourself.
The next match will begin in half an hour.” Grimacing, Task slapped some bacta
on his bruises and started putting his battered armor back on.
Eiven re-emerged to find his opponent already waiting for
him at the opposite end of the arena. His opponent this time was a Sith
Pureblood, red-skinned and red-eyed, bald but with a tendril of tentacles on
his chin, and naked to the waist, displaying the muscled build of a boxer. The
Sith had no weapons, and his only armor a pair of grey metal bracers.
The gong sounded. Eiven flicked his lightsaber pike into
life and held it near the head and pointed downwards. The Matukai moved confidently,
arms in front of him in what Eiven recognized as a Teräs Käsi stance. When they
were a meter apart he let the staff slide forward, then brought the blade up in
a strike toward the Pureblood’s head.
With Force-driven speed, the Matukai intercepted the blade
with his bracer—and with an audible snap and a whiff of ozone, the blade
destabilized and vanished. Inside his mask, Eiven swore, even as he quickly
retreated and swung his staff around, bringing the other end to bear. The
Pureblood’s bracers must be pure cortosis; his lightsaber-blade would be
useless for minutes.
In the time it took for Task to reignite his blade, the Sith
had already come inside his reach. After a momentary struggle, Eiven felt the
weapon ripped from his hands, to strike the energy shield at the top of the
arena with a crackle. Retreating another step, Eiven assumed an Echani stance.
They struck at nearly the same time. Task received the worst
of it, the brutal Force-strengthened blows of the Sith ripping through his
already damaged armor, though for his troubles the Sith had endured a
half-dozen brutal Echani strikes that left spots of purple blood and a couple
teeth on the floor of the arena. Then with a sickening crunch Eiven’s world
flickered and went black—repeated head strikes had finally damaged his helmet
too much for him to see through the visor. Task’s panic about fighting blind
was removed a moment later when a wrenching blow ripped the helmet from his
head.
Task let loose a seemingly wild left-handed blow. The
overconfident Sith caught the human’s fist in his right hand. Eiven’s smile was
a grim line on his face as he reached out with the Force and flicked on the
lightsaber embedded in his forearm. The bloodshine blade bit through the Matukai’s
hand, burnt fingers dropping to the floor. The Sith’s sudden shock and pain was
all the opening Task needed, and the last sight the crippled Pureblood saw was
the blazing lightsaber aimed at his head.
*
The third match was between a human Jensaarai and a former
Imperial Knight, both female. The ex-Knight was a miraluka, a race of
near-humans that were naturally blind, but compensated for their lack of sight
with inherent Force senses, and competed in a tight-fitting black jumpsuit with
blindfold. The Jensaraai competed in full armor, and appeared to be a jar’kai
specialist, wielding a pair of lightsaber tonfas. Eiven Task watched the match
with interest, as both organizations were said to produce exceptional
lightsaber combatants.
The ex-Knight took the offensive with a blitzkrieg in the
aggressive Juyo style. Her speed and agility was breath taking, and the Jensaarai
was quickly forced back and on the defensive, with only the cortosis-weave
armor allowing the human to survive serious injury. Backed up nearly to the
wall of the arena, the Jensaarai tried to leap over the miraluka—and the
silvery-white blade of the ex-Knight’s lightsaber cut through the weakened
armor, bisecting the human woman in two. To her credit, the miraluka quickly
ran her lightsaber blade through the gap between the helmet and chestpiece,
ending the Jensaarai’s life quickly.
The fourth match was between the muun Milos Sothas and a
multi-limbed cyborg that wielded a pair of light-whips on its primary arms and
a pair of heavy claws on its lower, secondary arms; balancing itself on four
heavy pincer-legs. Sothas took a fencer’s stance, and when the gong sound
ignited his lightsaber blade—a thin, highly accurate lightfoil which he wielded
with one hand, a short shoto blade in the other.
The cyborg rushed in, light-whips leaving long black scars
in the floor of the arena. Sothas moved with easy grace through the Soresu
stances, deflecting and evading attacks with calm assurance. Task could feel
the Force flowing through the muun, anticipating strikes, scoring hits where the
cyborg presented openings, leaving no such vulnerabilities in his own defense.
The cyborg attempted to power through and overwhelm the muun, attacking with
both whips in tandem, but every time his attacks fell just a little short.
After a third particularly frenzied rush, Milos Sothas stepped aside at the last
moment and with a deft slash of his lightfoil, both of the mechanical limbs on
the right side of the cyborg’s body fell to the ground.
The cyborg screeched in pain or rage, and its remaining
light-whip arced at the muun like the unraveled thread of a star. Sothas merely
seemed to raise his lightfoil and duck; the light-whip caught on the blade and
swung back around, the burning thread slicing through armor and prostheses to
flash-boil what few organic bits remained in the metal shell.
The crowd cheered. Displays flickered rapidly as bets were
paid out, odds adjusted, and the timer for the penultimate match began counting
down. Milos Sothas caught Eiven’s face in the crowd. We need to talk. The muun’s thought-voice echoed in Task’s brain.
Eiven hurried to meet Sothas in the locker room before the semifinal match
against the former Imperial Knight.
*
“Vaapad.” The muun said.
“Wampashit.” Task said. “Nobody knows Vaapad. Born and died
with Mace Windu. It’s just Juyo—and she’s really good at it.”
“Task, I’ve been at this longer than you. Trained a lot of
fighters in my time, seen every style there is to see. That wasn’t Juyo, and
there’s only one other thing I’ve even heard of that fits. That Knight took a
Jensaarai apart like a training droid, and didn’t even take a scratch.” He
scratched at his beard. “There’s bound to still be some footage around of Windu
or someone else using it, or even a holocron. One way or another, she has it—or
at least a passable imitation.”
The two Force-adepts stared at one another from across the
moon. Eiven still wasn’t sure if he trusted the muun. Task had killed two of
the old adept’s apprentices, and that had impressed Sothas enough to invite
Eiven to the tournament. Yet the old muun had not sought to become his master,
or teach or train him in any way. They both knew that if the muun survived this
next match, they’d be facing each other to the death.
“Why are you telling me this?” The human asked.
The muun smiled. “Because I think I know how to beat her.
But if I die out there, I want you to take her down for me. But there’s one
thing I want to know first: how did you lose your arm?”
Task instinctively flexed his prosthetic left arm. A
straight line of scar tissue ran from the side of his neck down to his hip, and
everything to the left of that consisted of cybernetic replacements for the
bones and organs that should have been there.
“At the Jedi Academy.
I was one of the padawans. Sixteen years old, ego as big as a moon. I’d been
studying how weapons were imbued with the Force. A stick that could meet a
lightsaber in combat. I thought…I thought I’d figured out how to do it with
unarmed combat.” He swallowed, throat suddenly dry. “I’d seen one of the
Skywalkers do something like that, once. Deflect a lightsaber with their hand.
Different technique. I didn’t know. But I was stupid enough to try it.” Task
held up his prosthetic limb. “This is how they saved my life.”
The muun nodded. “And after?”
“Ran away. Ran far away. I thought I’d lost my connection to
the Force forever. Got drunk for a week. By the time I realized I still had a
connection to the Force, I’d hopped a ship out toward the Rim. I did…things for
money, for food. Stole a bit, read what I could get my hands on. Trained from
what I could remember. And spent the next ten years digging through the trash
that the Jedi and Sith had left buried throughout the galaxy. Lightsabers,
holocrons, manuals, old training droids…”
“You’ve done well, boy. Held your own and better.” Sothas
said. “Now listen close…”
*
Eiven Task did not watch the fight. He sat cross-legged in
the locker room, eyes closed, controlling his breathing. There were hundreds of
living beings up above, vibrant eddies in the Force, all together a teeming
mass. Unaware of the Force, or any of their latent potential, they directed it
sluggishly according to unconscious instincts, often canceling each other out.
Maybe three would have a precognitive glimmer of this fight’s end. Perhaps one
would realize and act on it.
By contrast, the duel itself was like two storms raging. The
Force was strong in muun and miraluka alike. Sothas was tight and controlled,
his precognitive powers stretched as far as possible; added speed and strength
to aged limbs, and endurance beyond limits. The edges of his mind flickered
against that of the ex-Imperial Knight, reading intentions, trying to sow doubt
and fear, and mostly failing. Her naked aggression stung Task, even from here.
An angry competitiveness and burning desire honed by long practice, channeled
into her swordplay. It was like trying to predict a storm, the attacks wild and
erratic, no tactics to them, but driving power. Each trusted in the Force to
guide their blows, and the result was a bloodless dance with burning blades.
Task felt the slip, as Sothas overextended himself. The
sudden flare and fade as his life ended. Then Eiven Task opened his eyes, and
let the world back in. The hammering vibration of the crowd’s cheer reached
even down here. The semifinals were over.
*
Task entered the arena without his helmet and armor, feeling
almost naked. The crowd saw him as though for the first time. The lean, wiry
build more reminiscent of the marathoner than a boxer or fencer. A tanned,
lined face that spoke of long days in the desert and fields. His hair was a
shaggy mix of brown and gold, cropped short, and only the sliver of silver
around the irises of his brown eyes spoke of any non-human parentage. In his
right hand he carried his lightsaber-pike; his prosthetic left arm was bare,
the lightsaber shoto build into the forearm visible.
The ex-Knight came out in the same gear from the last match.
She was taller than Task, but even thinner, with straight silvery-white hair
that hung down to the neck. In addition to her own lightsaber, Sothas’
lightfoil hung at her belt. He assumed a Shien stance, the lightsaber pike held
in front of him in both hands near the base, maximizing his reach. She made a
salute, then held the blade in front of her at a forty-five degree angle.
The crowd grew silent and tense.
The gong sounded.
The first dozen passes he kept her at spear’s-reach, meeting
her stroke for counter-stroke, trying to steer her into the wall. The ex-Knight
realized this quickly and changed tactics, whirling about, his strikes always a
split-second behind her current position. Task felt as much as saw her
spiraling in, moving inside his guard, and he adjusted the lightsaber pike to
match, drawing it closer to him, rotating it around his body.
Within minutes they were both within range of each other,
ducking, weaving, slashing. He thrust the staff between her legs, trying to
trip her up, but she rolled around and over him, coming up with her back to
him. Eiven brought the phrik-staff down on her, but the blindfolded miraluka
struck without turning her head, her silvery-white blade flashing. The bottom
half of Task’s lightsaber-pike hit the arena floor with a clank.
Stooping down, Eiven picked up the fallen part of the staff
in his left hand. With a flicker of the Force, the silvery-white blade in the
other end ignited, and he stood up with a blade in either hand. He barely had
time to block as the ex-Knight, renewed her attack, building up into the
frenzied pace that had overcome Sothas and the Jensaarai. Task gave ground,
dual-wielding the short-bladed clubs in an improvised fashion, falling back on
old Niman techniques.
It wasn’t enough. Every moment the female near-human built
greater speed, her lightsaber strikes coming as little more than blurs, and
Task struggled to bring his blades up to counter her random assault.
“Tell me.” The blind woman whispered, just loud enough for
him to hear. “How many blades do you see?”
In one terrible moment, he thought he saw three lightsaber
blades striking at once—and in the next second, the two halves of the
lightsaber-pike were knocked out of his hand. He backed away a few steps as she
stood there, breathing hard, face flustered from the effort of the assault,
hair plastered to her forehead.
Defiant, he turned sideways, and raised his flesh-and-blood
right hand, the edge towards her. His left arm came up level to his chest, and
he flicked the short-bladed red lightsaber blade there to life. The jewel in
the lightsaber tugged at his consciousness, and as the muun had told him to,
Eiven opened himself to it. In that moment, Task could feel the ex-Imperial
Knight as if he had stepped into her own skin. Their pulses beat in time. She
raised her blade to prepare to strike, and he could see how it was going to be.
They shared that moment, the vision of his death at her lightsaber stroke.
They moved at the same time. Eiven’s bare right hand caught
the silvery-white blade at about the middle. There was a flash of pain, and the
smell of burning flesh, but the blade ceased its deadly arc. Then Task stepped
forward and drove his bloodshine blade in a left-handed uppercut, straight into
her heart.
The crowd went wild. Some went bankrupt. Servants and medics
rushed out. Eiven remembered them packing his right hand in bacta. Oona the
Hutt came down to congratulate him, presenting the seven holocrons that were
his prize—three red four-sided Sith pyramids, a pair of blue Jedi cubes, a
purple eight-sided prism from the Jensaarai, and a yellow cubic infocron from
the Matsukai.
Later, in his ship The
Memory of Alderaan, through the pain and the pain-medications, heading away
from Tatooine on a route he hoped would avoid the worst of the thieves and
pirates, he allowed himself a little smile.
He had won.
###
