Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [182]
In this I had an invisible ally: all my targets were spacers. Something about traveling through the vastness of space, never knowing if a jump will go bad, dropping you into a sun or leaving you stuck in hyperspace forever, that makes spacers a bit superstitious. For years I’d worn a Jedi Medallion as a good luck charm. I’d infiltrated the Invids because I read an omen in a dream. If enough things began to go wrong, if there were enough signs of impending doom, even the hardcore Invids would begin looking elsewhere for planets to plunder and places to stay.
In all of the places I went I did my best to memorize what I could. Knowing as much as possible about various layouts was vital if I was to slip in and slip out again. The game I was going to play was very dangerous, but it was one that I had to win, so I did everything I could to control all the variables.
After a week, I had enough information to start planning my campaign. I laid everything out, figured who I would hit first and how, then where I would move next. I had to hit hard to keep the pressure on, yet I had to strike at random so I could not be anticipated and trapped.
It wasn’t going to be easy, but then if it was, it wouldn’t have been a job for a Jedi.
Only one last thing needed to be accomplished before I could begin.
I needed a lightsaber.
Elegos uncovered my grandfather’s instructions on how to create a lightsaber fairly early on, and my heart almost sank. The datafile was rather specific about the various supplies that would be needed to create the weapon, so I had a shopping list. Beyond that, however, the file detailed the steps needed to put the weapon together and included the various meditations and exercises a Jedi apprentice should go through with each step along the way. The process Nejaa laid out, if followed precisely, would take almost a month, and I didn’t have a month. I knew impatience and haste were part of the dark side, but really hoped things could be truncated so I could actually succeed in my task.
I took the first step by collecting the various parts. The lightsaber, while an elegant and deadly weapon, actually was not that complex. Getting the parts to put one together was not difficult at all. To serve as the hilt, for example, I salvaged the throttle assembly and handlebar tube from a junked speeder bike. I took it from where the wreck hung in the Crash cantina and no one so much as noticed me make off with it. I got the dimetris circuitry for the activation loop from an old capital-ship-grade ion cannon fire initiation controller—won that piece of junk from Shala betting on another tuskette fight. The recharger port and wiring came from a comlink. A milled down Tri-fighter laser flashback suppressor became the parabolic, high-energy flux aperture to stabilize the blade and I pulled the dynoric laser feed line from the same broken laser cannon to act as the superconductor for energy transference from the power cell to the blade. Buttons and switches were easy to find, and dear old Admiral Tavira, with her gift of the brandy decanter and snifters, provided me all the jewels I needed to make a half dozen lightsabers.
The most difficult part of creating a lightsaber was producing the power cell that stored and discharged the amount of energy necessary to energize a lightsaber blade. That said, the parts list called for a pretty basic power cell—in fact, because of the age of the instructions, I had a hard time locating one that ancient. Newer power cells were more efficient than the one my grandfather had specified, but I didn