“I’m glad to hear it,” Ahsoka told her. “But I think you should get to bed before someone comes looking for you, just to save your reputation.”
Hedala giggled and went on her way, leaving Ahsoka with her thoughts.
The shadow was almost certainly one of the dark side’s creatures. Ahsoka had no idea what sort of thing it might be, but whatever it was couldn’t be that powerful, because it hadn’t been able to track down Hedala. That ruled out Palpatine himself, not that the Emperor could just show up on a planet without causing a great deal of alarm. It also ruled out whatever Palpatine was using to track down surviving Jedi. Ahsoka had heard rumors of a dark lord who served the Emperor, but nothing confirmable. As usual, she felt rather cut off without her former channels of intelligence. At least Hedala said the shadow was gone.
Ahsoka spared a momentary thought to wonder where it went. She tallied the days on her fingers, accounting for time spent in hyperspace, which always made things a bit fuzzy, and realized that Hedala’s shadow had left shortly after Ahsoka had rescued Kaeden on Raada. It was probably a coincidence, but at the same time, Ahsoka had been around long enough to know that coincidences and the Force rarely went together. There was always some sort of link.
She drummed her fingers on her knees, the way Hedala had earlier, and wondered what the shadow would do to Raada once it learned Ahsoka was gone. It hadn’t done anything to the Fardis, but they weren’t already the targets of an Imperial investigation. Perhaps she should try to draw the shadow back.
Except, of course, that would put Hedala in danger again and Ahsoka, as well. Ahsoka resisted the urge to smack her head against the wall. It was difficult to keep one’s own counsel. She missed being able to ask for advice. Imagining what her masters would do was only so useful, and she always felt foolish when she talked to herself. When she meditated and thought about the quandary, the voice that came to her with a suggestion was, somewhat surprisingly, Padmé Amidala’s. Ever the politician, the Naboo senator prized gathering information and playing to her strengths.
At this particular moment, Ahsoka’s strengths were all inside the Fardi compound. She was as protected as she could be, she had access to the Holonet for news, and if she invested a little more time in making the older members of the family trust her, they would probably be able to give her a very good idea of what was going on, even if she had to construct it backward from shady trade deals. It wasn’t the way Ahsoka was used to thinking about politics, but with any luck, it wasn’t the way her unknown opponents were expecting her to act, either.
Ahsoka lay down, putting her head on the pillow and thinking, as she always did, how much softer it was than anything she’d slept on when she was a Padawan. If she was going to learn about intergalactic trade in the morning, she might as well be rested.
Fardi had been surprised when, only a week into her stay, Ahsoka had come to him with a request for a new job. He’d insisted on watching her piloting skills firsthand, which made sense given the stakes of the family business. Ahsoka knew she had impressed him, both in the atmosphere around Thabeska and on a circuit of the system at large.
“It’s not as if you can’t do both jobs,” Fardi said as Ahsoka landed the freighter, their last test run completed. “We’ll let you know when we have need of a pilot. Nothing else will change.”
That suited Ahsoka just fine.
They started her off with small jobs. She flew to other cities on Thabeska, controlled by other branches of the family, and made deliveries. Sometimes she flew her own ship, and sometimes she was assigned a larger one. She never asked what was in the crates, so if her cargo didn’t match the manifest, she didn’t know about it. After her tenth trip, she was starting to think that the Fardis smuggled just to stay in practice, except that every time she dropped something off, in some dark alley or behind an isolated warehouse, the people receiving it were emaciated, desperate, and
She learned that the main weapon of the Empire, after fear, was hunger. She had seen this strategy at work on Raada and also during the Clone Wars, but to see it applied on such a large scale made her very uncomfortable. The Empire was still new, still establishing itself in the outer reaches of the galaxy, and yet it was already incredibly powerful. And she realized that she had helped build it. The mechanisms put in place during the Clone Wars had been twisted for the Empire’s use, and every day the Emperor’s hold grew tighter. She almost admired Palpatine for his ability to pull off a long-term plan—except for his being evil and all.
