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“You can’t hold them off yourself, sir.”

“I think I can. Besides, I need to try to talk to them. This is senseless.”

“They’ve gone mad,” the droid said. “They’re destroying droids all over the city!”

“They aren’t mad,” Dorsk averred. “They’re just frightened. The Yuuzhan Vong are on Ando, and may well conquer the planet.”

“But why destroy droids, Master Dorsk?”

“Because the Yuuzhan Vong hate machines,” the Khommite clone answered. “They consider them to be abominations.”

“How can that be? Why would they believe that?”

“I don’t know,” Dorsk replied. “But it is a fact. Go, please. Help the others board. My pilot is already at the controls with the flight instructions, so even if something happens to me, you’ll be okay.”

Still the droid hesitated. “Why are you helping us, sir?”

“Because I am a Jedi and I can. You don’t deserve destruction.”

“Neither do you, sir.”

“Thank you. I do not intend to be destroyed.”

He raised his head up again as the droid finally followed its clattering, whirring comrades to the waiting ship.

The crowd had reached the ancient stone causeway connecting the atoll-city of Imthitill to the abandoned fishing platform Dorsk now crouched on. It seemed they were all on foot, which meant all he had to do was prevent them from crossing the causeway.

With a single bound, Dorsk propelled his thin body up onto the causeway, forsaking the cover of the step down to the fishing platform. Lightsaber held at his side, he watched the mob approach.

I am a Jedi, he thought to himself. A Jedi knows no fear.

Almost surprisingly, he didn’t. His training with Master Skywalker had been fretted with attacks of panic. Dorsk was the eighty-second clone of the first Khommite to bear his name. He’d grown up on a world well satisfied with its own peculiar kind of perfection, and that hadn’t prepared him for danger, or fear, or even the unexpected. There were times when he believed he could never be as brave as the other Jedi students or live up to the standard set by his celebrated predecessor, Dorsk 81.

But watching the large, dark eyes of the crowd that was drawing close, he felt nothing but a gentle sadness that they had been driven to this. They must fear the Yuuzhan Vong terribly.

The destruction of droids had begun small, but in a few days had become a planetwide epidemic. The government of Ando—such as it was—neither condoned nor condemned the brutality, so long as no nondroids were killed or injured in the mess. Without help from the police, Dorsk 82 was the only chance the droids had, and he didn’t plan to fail them. He had already failed too many.

He ignited his lightsaber and for an instant saw everything around him at once. The setting sun had spilled a glorious slick of orange fire into the ocean and lit the high-piled clouds on the horizon into castles of flame. Higher, the sky faded to gold-laced jade and aquamarine and then the pale of night. The lights in the cylindrical white towers of Imthitill were winking on, one by one, and so, too, were the lights of the fishing platforms floating in the deeps, spangling the ocean with lonely constellations.

His own planet hadn’t any such untamed spectacles. Khomm’s weather was as predictable and homogenous as its people. Likely he, Dorsk 82, was the only person of his entire species who could appreciate this sky, or the iron-dressed waves of the sea.

Salt air buffeted around him. He lifted his chin. Somehow, after all of these years, he felt he was doing the thing he had dreamed about at last.

One of the Aqualish stepped before the rest. He was smaller than many, his tusks incised in the local style. He wore the dappled slicksuit of a tug worker.

“Move, Jedi,” he commanded. “These droids are none of your business.”

“These droids are under my protection,” Dorsk replied calmly.

“They are not yours to protect, Jedi,” the Aqualish shouted back. “If their owners do not object, you have no say in the matter.”

“I must disagree,” Dorsk replied. “I also plead with you to see reason. Destroying the droids will not appease the Yuuzhan Vong. They