The Cost of Calamity
Written by Liam Torun-Urr

Kiast System
Solyiat
Trepus, 2 Km from Transfer Station
36 ABY

Harsh, blistering winds raced across the jagged, rocky mountain ranges of the continent of Trepus, cold and unforgiving in the early morning as they raced through rocky gullies and across snow-capped peaks. Hard, black granite mingled with ice-white snow to form a tapestry of jutting mountains, sheer cliffs, winding switchback paths, and deep ravines, punctuated here and there with durasteel walkways and rectangular prefabricated buildings that marked mining operations and habitats. Columns of steam rose up from vents in the rock, rising up from the glowing hot depths of the planet's mantle and weaving around metallic poles that provided power to stations and plants across the planet. It was a bleak, desolate sight to most, an image of a land too harsh to host life on its own. To the old man, though, it looked much, much different.
	But then, most things looked different to a blind man.
	A face as craggy and age-scarred as the rocky precipices beyond, hidden largely behind bushy brows, a thick, chest-length beard, and a wild mane of untamed hair all as white as the snow of the peaks, stared sightlessly forward toward the interior of a cavern. He sat cross-legged atop a large rock, his brown and tan robes damp with perspiration and sweat, his worn black boots dotted with condensation. Beneath him, through cracks and faults in the rocky bottom of the cavern, wisps of steam and heat rose upward from a superheated aquifer far below. Behind him, snow and ice blew into the cavern, slowed and turned about by the flow of the wind around the curving, narrow entrance to the cave, depositing the frozen water that would give this cave its moisture and reliable heat. All of these motions, the movement of wind and snow, the slow, deliberate carving of rock by water and time, even the tectonic movements crawling beneath and the transfer of heat energy from superheated steam to cold air particles and frozen water molecules, were notes in the cosmic song that played through his mind. He had no eyes, but he could see the brush-strokes of a million colors in his mind, a million shades and facets. He heard no sound save dripping, the howling of wind, and the odd hiss, yet within him he could feel a thousand vibrations, a thousand notes and lilting tunes that played over him, through him, and around him. His body, cross-legged for four hours now, sat restful and still through it all.
	All the while, his mind danced, swimming and diving through the eddies and flows of the Living Force.
	Many called Trepus lifeless, yet they were wrong; slowly, the old man stretched out with his senses, feeling the growths of orange and green lichen and algae upon the rock, the twisting, bluish-white krux vines that made their home in the faults and deep places of this world. Small, slow-moving arthropods crawled across rocks and through faults, some of them brushing up against the Jedi as he meditated, others moving across his body and through his clothes. He did not begrudge them, nor did he welcome them; he simply was, and they simply moved. Peace, a deep, inner peace that came from time, practice, and the knowledge of one's mortality flowed through the old man as he opened his mind's eye, studying the movement and growth of the living things as they moved through faults carved by water, over rocks that had fallen or eroded away.
	As they moved, also, over and through structures nature had not left there at all.
	Slowly, stretching out not with his hands, but with his eyes, Liam took a deep breath of moisture-rich air and extended his reach with the Force. Tiny tendrils of unseen power, manipulations of tiny, star-like points of reality and the webs that bound all things together, wrapped around a flat stone and lifted it slowly, steadily, into the air. It rose above two pillars made by stacks of smaller rocks before slowly descending, coming to a rest atop the other two and forming an archway. Slowly, releasing his concentration and shifting into a standing position, Liam stretched and felt half a dozen bones and joints pop and move about. Pain issued throughout his muscles as he rubbed and rotated them, blood returning to areas left cold by long meditation and age. Some would have groaned and grumbled at such pain, yet the blind old Consular smiled; few humans in the Galaxy lived to see their eighth decade at all, let alone while walking the path of the Jedi Knight.
	Today was Liam's birthday, a day he'd long since forgotten. Today, he celebrated by creating, making pathways for life.
	The shrill, whooping beeps and whistles of an astromech droid greeted the old man as he walked from the cave mouth, limping faintly as pain worked to splay his hips wide. R4-5T - or Rusty, as Liam preferred to call the old C1 unit - grunted and grumbled with the feedback and hiss that came with having older, recycled vocabulators and worn processors. Some of his colleagues had told Liam that he should replace the droid's parts; Liam insisted that the feedback and sound issues were Rusty's personal touches, almost like an accent, and the droid had reinforced the opinion when a mechanic had tried to replace them on the sly and had been hit by a rather decisive taser to the chin as a result. Rusty's cylindrical frame lived up to the droid's name, its hatches nearly all of different colors and paint schemes and a few ground down from other models of droid to fit the chassis of this one. Bits of rust and wear marked the droid's body, exposed wire and electrical tape visible on his legs and shiny slats in his treads marking where some had been replaced. Rusty was almost as old as Liam, his memory core having begun life in a Separatist frame during the Clone Wars before being found by the Jedi on Umbara so many years before.
	Today, he was Liam's oldest friend, the helper who had kept him alive and the other voice that had kept him sane during decades of isolation.
	"Yes, yes, I'm coming," Liam chuckled as the droid indignantly beeped and growled at him. "I know, I took longer than I meant to. You should have seen the growth in there!" The angry whirrs subsided for a moment, replaced by a curious booping noise, and Liam couldn't help but laugh. He didn't know Droidspeak, but he knew Rusty's mannerisms well enough to guess the meaning. "No, I don't think you need to catalogue the mosses. We'll be back in a month or two anyway, to see if they take to the new structures. The arch in particular-..."
	A loud blasting noise, echoing violently through the peaks of the mountains and sending a plume of snow into the sky, rocked from the Transfer Station nearby. Liam's sharp nose caught the scent of burning plastoid and carbon, his feet feeling the vibrations and aftershocks of the burst. Not an earthquake - it wasn't a sturdy wave of pressure, but rather a sharp, sudden blast. His blind eyes narrowed; even now, he knew well the feel of an explosion.
	"Come on, Rusty," Liam said, as he hobbled toward the landspeeder nearby the cave. It looked nearly as worn out and beaten up as the Jedi and his droid, but that was the way Liam liked things; dependable, working, and well-maintained. "It seems the Force has ordained our path today."
	The astromech let out a long-suffering whoop as it was lifted into the landspeeder's droid port, locking in and plotting coordinates for its blind rider.

* * *

"Fire in the hole!" Atkins shouted, as another glass bottle filled with starfighter fuel and cloth came flying toward the durasteel barricades the Lieutenant hid behind. Glass shattered and heat wrapped around the foot-thick metal as he sat behind it, hitting the recycle on his blaster rifle and letting its venting systems cool. His uniform, a navy blue jacket and trousers trimmed with white along the arms and legs, was stained with black marks and ash from the initial explosion. A white plastoid breastplate, the same color as his helmet, a rounded cap in the style of old Rebel scouts, provided some protection against blaster bolts; nothing would stop a direct, full-powered hit, but the breastplate would at least diffuse the worst of the energy as it knocked him out. Such a thing had saved more than one soldier's life on the battlefield. Lifting his rifle, an old but dependable EL-16HFE, he fired a few more shots at the adversary.
	Clad in heavy gear painted a darker, industrial yellow, the enemy's attire seemed better suited to protection from thermal vents and heavy impacts than blaster fire. They wore what had to be retrofitted environment suits, some wearing little to no head protection and others wearing helmets from a dozen places, from commonplace mercenary gear to reclaimed stormtrooper helmets, all painted to match their suits. Their weapons, too, were a mish-mash - old E-11 rifles, A280s, even older E-5 models used in the Clone Wars and before, all refurbished and put back into service. More improvised explosives were thrown, two more glass jars of fuel and what looked like a jury-rigged demolition charge, the same model a salvage operation might use.
	The front entryway to the Trepus Transfer Station, a flat, brown-painted durasteel wall with no adornments save for aurebesh lettering, heavy blast doors, and orange glowrods in mesh baskets, sat behind two durasteel barricades that had slid up out of the floor of the landing platform when the attack had begun. Beyond the door, supported on a frame of metal struts and bolts, a wide durasteel landing pad with a simple, three-bar railing rested nearby, its blank and weather-worn surface emblazoned with the symbol of House Hoth painted in black. The massive frame of a CR-90 Corvette emblazoned with blue and the words Pride of Owyhyee, pockmarked here and there by asteroid impacts and laser blasts, cast shadow across the platform and provided protection for those attacking the platform; before it, two X-Wing starfighters sat, one ready for use, the other crippled by an explosion beneath its fuselage and spewing fumes and smoke into the sky.
	"Horace!" Lieutenant Atkins snapped, looking to his subordinate, a Rodian in the blues and whites of Hoth uniform. "Who are these guys? Some kind of scavengers, or pirates?"
	"Look up, L-Ten!" The green-skinned alien replied, locking his black, multi-faceted eyes with the gunmetal gray orbs of his commander. His long, wide-knuckled finger ended in a suction cup as it pointed, drawing Atkins' vision to a squat, misshapen lump of metal that seemed to float in the sky. Cylindrical tubes and elevator shafts linked to metallic rectangles and squares, all supported atop a bed of round repulsorlift banks and dangling bundles of cord and wire. Old E-Web emplacement blasters, most of them probably dating back to the Galactic Civil War, rained down fire on any Hoth forces that dared to show themselves as beings raced back and forth across connecting platforms and ladders.
	It was a floating refinery - no, more than that, a floating town. "Quorahi?" Atkins snapped, the perspiration in his black moustache freezing into white crystals of ice. "What in blazes are the Folk attacking us for?" As another glass bottle smashed, he leaned out, firing another sequence of blasts at the foes that had thus far managed to keep his men pinned down. "We need air support; can we get the House on comms?"
	"Negative, sir, the bulk of our forces just left and these bastards took out the tower!" Horace replied, pointing up toward a smoking ruin of metal and wires on a nearby peak.
	"Well, then," Atkins growled, dropping the spent power back from his rifle and slapping another one into place, "Looks like it's just us, then."
	"Lieutenant! Incoming!" A soldier shouted, as a dark shape came racing overhead - and launched over their position, its shadow briefly streaking through the air toward the Quorahi platform. As quickly as it had launched, it began to drop, and Atkins' eyes widened in surprise to make out the shape of a landspeeder flying toward the hulking platform. That wasn't what drew a gasp of surprise from him, though.
	That came from the tiny figure that leapt from the speeder, twin flashes of light signalling its landing. "No way...," Atkins said in shock. "Could it be?" The sounds of crackling energy, screams, and shearing metal greeted him as the platform began to list away, apparently distracted. "Now's our chance!" He shouted, adjusting his round, white helmet and lowering its blast shield. "Push back! Move!" With a battle cry, the men of Hoth leapt from cover, dumping a wave of azure blaster bolts toward their enemies and forcing them into cover. Two, then three, then four of the enemy's troops went down as they retreated behind crates of repair parts and other improvised cover, firing back wildly at the soldiers of Hoth. For a few moments that seemed to stretch into hours, the fight became a vicious tug-of-war, each side struggling to gain or lose ground over the landing pad. Soon, the stalemate became a quagmire, fifteen soldiers of Hoth with better gear and training giving forty-five Quorahi the fight of their lives.
	Then, just as the tide began to turn, Atkins saw a shadow fall over them all. Looking up, his eyes widened as he witnessed the Quorahi platform moving downward, on a diagonal - straight for the landing pad. "Get down!"
	The impact was loud and brutal, one corner of the roughly square platform slamming into durasteel and scraping against the paint. Its bulk knocked aside the burning ruin of the damaged X-Wing, shattering it into composite parts, and slid before coming to a halt. As it did, its aft section slammed against the docked Pride, causing the vessel's engine to buck and slide, stopped only by a section of crumpling railing. For a few seconds, dust and snow settling from the impact, both sides were quiet and confused.
	Then, emerging from the dust, a tall figure wielding twin blades in burning white advanced.
	Liam Torun's hair and cloak, swept by the winter wind, cut quite the striking figure as he strode forth from the downed Quorahi ship. Each bootstep was determined, each movement fluid, the Force flowing through him to steady his footfalls and lend strength and control to muscles affected by time. As he went, he extended his Force senses outward, searching for small objects. Placing himself between the Quorahi and the Hothan forces, he stood in a defensive stance, his cataract-grayed eyes staring forward and past the foes. Two discarded blaster pistols and a helmet slowly floated into the air, where they began to slowly rotate. "That," Liam said to them, "Is quite enough. Let's talk."
	Slowly, one of the Quorahi came forward, a tall figure clad in heavy gear and what looked like an old Clone Trooper helmet. "Why should we talk to you, Jedi?" Her voice rang out as she disconnected her helmet seal, revealing the head of a Zabrak woman. "You, who the Empress props up. Who invade without cause, and take what isn't yours?"
	"Well, for starters," Liam said calmly, "I've just downed your platform, and drawn the combat to a stalemate. So let's talk."
	A few seconds of silence came, as Quorahi and Hoth soldiers both slowly emerged from cover, their weapons at the ready and their faces uncertain. Atkins looked at his foes, one eyebrow raised, ready to fire if he needed. "What's the meaning of this attack?"
	"The meaning of it is freedom, invader," spat the Quorahi woman. "We're done being tread upon by the Empress, by the Vatali. This world will be ours, our sovereign land - and the first stage of that is taking care of you, Kaltani's pet Jedi, before she can set you upon us," She stood at the ready, and her forces visibly bristled, ready to fight. "We will be victorious this day?"
	"You may be, yes," Liam replied coolly, his saberstaff thrumming steadily through the blowing winter breeze. "But ask yourself this. What follows?" A few seconds went by, as Quorahi soldiers looked to one another, in confusion. The floating objects had begun to spin faster, each spinning through the air with velocity enough to keep snow from building up, to blur their images. "What does the Vatali Empire do in response? Would you set back the progress of your people, and entrench yourselves as enemies?"
	"We are already their enemies! They tread on us at every turn!" The woman spat back at him in return. "We are not free!"
	"You are. Underprivileged, perhaps, but free," Torun replied. "Far more than you would have been under the Vauzem, or any of another dozen noble houses. Houses the Empress - your Empress - went to war with to stop. To entrench your protections." Liam's eyes still stared onward, sightless, but he tilted his head toward the Zabrak as he spoke. "It is time to call off this farce, to collect your wounded and go home before-," Liam was cut off by a yell from behind him, as a blaster shot discharged toward the Quorahi Captain. Two of her troops advanced at the sound, their own weapons charging up in response. 
	The Jedi hardly moved; his saberstaff simply tilted to the right, catching the blaster bolt and knocking it outward over the canyon, away from harm. The three spinning objects went flying, two forward and one backward, each taking one of the advancing soldiers in the gut.
	"What's the meaning of this, Jedi?" Atkins snapped, as he saw one of his soldiers fall with a groan. "I thought you were on our side."
	"Side?" Liam replied. "I am on the side of peace. We're not done talking." He looked toward the Quorahi. "My speeder's communications system has relayed a distress call to Joint Task Force Hoth, bounced off of my starfighter. Our reinforcements should be here within half an hour. Should you retreat," Liam said, hearing the shift of movement among the Quorahi, the whispers of doubt, "I will call them off, and inform them that all is peaceful here. This was all an unfortunate misunderstanding."
	The Quorahi looked between one another, before the woman's voice called to him again. This time, she sounded uncertain. "And if we refuse?"
	"It's really quite simple. We'll crush you," Liam said with a warm, grandfatherly smile. Even Atkins sucked in a breath; he knew the Jedi meant it, knew it just from hearing him say the words. Liam extended his blade, pointing it toward the Quorahi platform. "Aside from a few defensive guns, some platforms and doors, and a few wounded soldiers, your platform is largely unharmed. I merely turned off half of its repulsors. If you lay down your arms and leave," He said, letting silence stretch for a few seconds, "We'll let you go. No harm done."
	The seconds stretched into minutes, and seemed to stretch into an eternity, both sides slowly and cautiously ready for renewed gunfire. Yet, none of them called Torun's bluff; neither side wanted to invoke the wrath of a lightsaber. It was over as quickly as it had begun, Quorahi returning to their vessel, and as they lifted off and departed Atkins slowly strode up to Liam, watching as his blades retracted into his weapon. "You let them go." He shouldered his rifle, watching the departing platform disappear over the nearby mountains to resume its salvaging and mining runs. "They attacked us, and you're letting them leave. Why?"
	"It's simple, really," Liam replied with a smile. He sighed, and as he did he seemed to stoop in stature, his hands beginning to tremble and his posture growing worse, betraying his age. "I have been in many wars, soldier, and many battles. Peace is preferable, wherever we can find it."
	"Peace has a cost," Atkins replied. "A cost that has to be paid, when things like these happen."
	"It does indeed. But tell me, soldier," he asked, as he started moving toward the doors of the Transfer Station, "What price is greater? That of peace," He let the word hang for a few seconds, "Or the price of war?"
	The Jedi let the question hang in the air, as he disappeared beyond the blast doors.