Free Star Wars: The Old Republic: Fatal Alliance by Sean Williams Page B

to be completely cut off from his chain of
command was even worse. He could feel his hands beginning to tremble,
and to hide that he stuffed them with his comlink into his pockets.

    "All
right, " he said, turning back to the attentive Sergeant
Potannin and beaming the brightest smile he could manage. "I'm
all yours. "

    Smoothly
falling into formation around him, they marched him off to be
outfitted for his new role.

    PART
TWO
    HUTTA
    CHAPTER
7

    The
glorious jewel of the Y'Toub system rose like a bloated corpse from
the bottomless sea of space. Shigar squinted out at it, glad for the
first time that they hadn't found more opulent transport. The
passenger lounge of the Red Silk Chances was filthy, and its
viewports barely counted as translucent, but the squalor matched the
view. Hutta looked every bit as foul as its reputation suggested,
moldy green and brown like a fruit left to ripen too long, bursting
with rot from within.

    Larin
sat next to him, and their shoulders jostled together every time the
freighter rattled beneath them. Her face was hidden by the helmet of
her increasingly nonregulation armor, but he could tell from the
straightness of her spine that she was paying close attention to
everyone around them. The droids and lowlifes taking the trip with
them warranted it. Thus far there had been two knife fights, several
games of rigged dejarik, numerous arguments over the outcome of the
latest Great Hunt, and a vigorous sing-along-in a dialect Shigar had
never heard before-that had felt as though it might last forever.

    Seeking
to calm his nerves, he closed his eyes and concentrated on an oddly
shaped shard of plastoid in his right hand that he had picked up in
the streets of Coruscant as they had waited to board their shuttle.
Nothing about it was familiar, so there was no way his conscious mind
could guess its origins or purpose. Determining either or both of
those was where his psychometric ability was supposed to come in.

    About
one in a hundred Kiffar were born with this particular Force talent,
deciphering the origin and history of objects by touch alone.
Shigar's came and went despite his every effort, and it was this lack
of control that had at least partly put off the Jedi Council when it
came to allowing his trials. Plenty of Jedi Knights had no
psychometric ability whatsoever, but all were supposed to intimately
know their own strengths and weaknesses. A wild talent of any kind
was not acceptable.

    Shigar
focused on his breathing and let the Force flow strongly through him.
The shaking of the freighter and the chattering of its passengers
receded. He felt only the complex shape of the object in his palm,
and examined the way it sat in the universe without recourse to his
usual senses. Was it old or new? Did it come from nearby or far away?
Was it precious or disposable? Had it been dropped deliberately or
without care? Was it manufactured or handmade? Were there thousands
of such things in the galaxy, or was this the only one that had ever
existed?

    Half-felt
impressions came and went. He saw a woman's face-a human woman, with
wide-set brown eyes and a distinctive scar across her chin. He
pursued that mental scent as far as it went, but nothing more came to
him. He let it go, and realized then that he had seen this woman in
the old districts, while walking off his anger at the Council's
decision. She had been selling roasted spider-roaches to an Abyssin
with one eye. His mind had thrown up her face in desperation. She had
nothing at all to do with the scrap of plastoid.

    A
Jedi Knight is a Jedi Knight in all respects, Master Nobil had said.
Until he controlled this talent, he could hardly be said to have
control over himself. On that point he had no defense.

    Frustrated,
he opened his eyes and put the scrap back into his pocket. He had a
few pockets now, mainly down his chest and the front of his thighs.
They added several kilograms to his body mass and jingled when he
walked. The unfamiliar