• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Barriss had stopped stretching; now she stood, arms folded against her chest, looking at the Bunduki master. "You’re an expert fighter, and your hands and feet are as much weapons as a vibroblade or a stun baton," she told him. "Those men had no more chance than they would have had you used a blaster on them. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous."

"Are you calling me a liar, Jedi?"

There was no mistaking the danger in his tone now. This is exactly what he wants you to do. Ignore him. Turn away.

She faced him squarely. "Yes."

He smiled again, a cruel, triumphant smile. "Such an accusation presupposes the willingness to back it up. Would you care to demonstrate the efficacy of your mystical Force against my expertise?"

With the greatest of difficulty Barriss held her anger in check and kept her mouth shut.

She conjured up be-fore her mind’s eye the disapproving visage of Master Unduli. It helped, a little. She had known when she’d first spoken that this was the road down which she’d started, had known it was the wrong path for her. And yet, here she was...

After a moment, he laughed. "That’s what I thought. I beat one of your Jedi Knights in a hand-to-hand match, and it wouldn’t really be fair for me to pick on a lowly Padawan, now would it? Enjoy your exercise, Jedi."

He turned contemptuously and started to walk away.

Barriss couldn’t stop herself. She raised her hand, concentrated, and closed her open fingers into a fist.

As Ji took another step, time seemed to slow for Barriss. Ji’s left foot came forward, and as it approached his right, his boot twisted inward, no more than a few degrees - just enough to catch the heel of his forward boot.

He tripped.

A man of lesser skill would have fallen flat on his face upon the wet ground. And, despite her knowledge that it was wrong, Barriss would have enjoyed that sight.

But even as he fell, Ji tucked into an ovoid shape, one arm curving, hand turned inward slightly, so that his motion looked like a deliberate action: he dived, rolled on his arm, shoulder, and back, coming up and turning slightly, a neat gymnastic move that left him standing in balance and facing her.

"Careful," she said. "The ground is slippery from the heavy dew."

He stood there for a moment, glaring. The sense of menace hung heavy in the air, the currents of it swirling about in the Force like a dark whirlwind. But even as angry as he was, he maintained control.

He turned away.

Once he was gone, Barriss shook her head at her ac-tion. What had she been thinking? One did not use the

Force for such childish, trivial things. It was wrong to take such petty action, even against a villain such as Phow Ji. Yes, it could have been an appropriate demon-stration, designed to teach, to show that the Force was valid, but she knew this had not been the case. It had been a personal response, driven by anger, and she had known better from the beginning. Great power had to be wielded with great care, and taking an obnoxious character down a level because you thought he deserved it was simply not sufficient justification. It was chasing a fire gnat with a turbolaser. Her Master would have been extremely displeased.

She was never going to become a Jedi Knight by be-having thusly.

Barriss sighed and went back to her stretches. Her road was hard enough already. Why did she keep strew-ing boulders in her own path?

17

Den Dhur had seen a number of odd sights in his years on interstellar assignments. To the best of his memory, however, he had never seen a droid sitting alone in a cantina.

When he walked in out of the syrupy heat of midday, it took his eyes several moments to adjust, even with the droptacs’ aid. As his vision cleared, he saw that the bar was mostly deserted. Leemoth, the Duros amphibian specialist, was seated in a far corner nursing a mug of Fromish ale, two clone sergeants sat at the bar, and at one of the nearer tables was the new protocol droid, I-Five.

There’s something you don’t see every day, Den thought. First off, droids rarely sat at all. Most of the more humanoid models