Chapter 2: The Whisper in the Wires
~ Coruscant, Level 1313
Marbs chirped twice. A low warble, almost hesitant. I didn't look up from the opened repulsor stabilizer I was calibrating.
"Loose pin again?" I asked, voice muffled through the respirator.
He chirped again. Higher this time. Insistent.
Not mechanical. Not diagnostic. A tone of concern.
I paused.
Marbs hovered slightly off the ground—barely, like he was pushing his repulsors past comfort just to get my attention. His lens shifted blue, then yellow. That meant anomaly.
I put the tool down and pulled off my gloves. "Show me."
He rotated his shell and projected a blue light against the far wall. A cluster of white lines appeared in a grid pattern—encrypted signals, full of jitter and pulse distortions. But the structure underneath... that was no accident. That was military-grade encryption.
And the frequency range—it wasn't local police or merchant nav.
It was Jedi.
My chest tightened slightly. "Where did you catch that?"
Marbs responded with a few scrolling lines of binary, then translated into speech—his voice modulated and grainy.
"Low-frequency tightbeam, bouncing off a maintenance relay. Not aimed down here. I caught a decay echo through the south sub-relay line."
"Jedi comms don't bounce down here," I muttered.
Marbs bobbed slightly in the air.
"This one did."
---
I shut the garage for the day.
Resh wouldn't miss me—he spent more time gambling in backroom sabacc pits than minding the shop. I pulled the shutters and took Marbs into the back room. His casing clicked softly with every rotation of his inner core.
We sat in silence. Me on the edge of the cot, him hovering at shoulder height. The projection floated again, brighter now.
It was a priority distress signal.
Not a wide broadcast. It was meant for a specific receiver, possibly a Jedi Temple node. Fragmented audio embedded in a rotating frequency loop. The encryption was older, but Marbs had been tinkering with my security libraries for years. He cracked enough to reconstruct the message's outer layers.
We played it.
"…repeat, this is Knight Geyra Aven, en route from Lothal. Ambush—unknown warship—repeat, unknown signature. Padawan injured. Need extraction. If you receive this, initiate clearance pattern Aurek—Jenth—Four."
The message clicked, then looped.
I let it play three more times, absorbing every tremor in her voice.
---
"Knight-class designation confirmed," Marbs replied. "Recent Temple assignments place her in the Outer Rim. Lothal, then Ordo sector. No records of return."
"Missing?"
"Officially—delayed. No confirmation of death."
The way the Force curled in the air around me told me differently.
---
I leaned back against the wall. The cot creaked. I closed my eyes, let the room fall away.
The Force stirred beneath my skin—not loud, but present. Not pulling, not pushing. Just waiting. Watching. Like a breath held too long.
Marbs floated silently, watching me.
We both knew what this meant.
And neither of us liked it.
---
"She's still alive," I finally said. "Or… at least, she was when she sent that."
"The signal is a month old," Marbs noted.
"Still matters."
"You don't want to get involved."
"I don't."
"But you are."
I sighed. "No. I'm just… deciding."
"What if they trace the relay source back here?"
"They won't."
"Unless it was bait."
I looked at him. He wasn't wrong. But the Force hadn't warned me. No pressure in the air, no spike in static, no scent of metal in my nose like it usually gave before danger.
"I'm not answering it," I said. "Just… passing it along."
"Anonymous transmission?"
"Encrypted route. Bounce it through three maintenance relays and mask it in old supply chain code. Send it to Temple frequency Delta 6. Use your new splice protocol."
Marbs spun once. "On your command."
I paused.
Then nodded. "Send it."
His projector dimmed. The signal vanished.
We sat in silence again. I didn't move. Didn't breathe too deep.
---
Marbs didn't only intercept the transmission meant for Jedi ears. Buried in the encrypted channel — almost as if it piggybacked on the signal — was something else. A broken string of code, chopped and looped, repeating over and over in Marbs' auditory core.
"CT," it said. "CT—class—Initiative—Kam—Kamino—Authorization Omega Red."
You frowned. "What's that?"
"Fragmented. Military. Hidden," Marbs replied. "Not meant for Jedi. Meant for Senate Command."
"Clone template?" you whispered aloud, the word strange in your mouth.
You didn't understand it then. But the Force stirred uncomfortably. Like a breath held too long. Like something waiting to uncoil.
That night, as you meditated, the Force whispered more clearly than it had in months:
"A war is being born. Not fought. Made."
You didn't know the word for it yet. But you knew this: it would come. It would consume.
---
"I just wanted to fix things," I muttered. "Stay quiet. Live clean."
Marbs said nothing.
---
That night, I sat on the rooftop again.
Coruscant was a dull hum around me—speeders, neon, distant shouting, layered exhaust clouds that blurred the stars. Somewhere far above, Jedi walked polished halls, waiting for a message I'd just sent them.
They wouldn't know who it came from. They wouldn't know I lived down here. But for a moment, our lives brushed together like wires sparking in the dark.
Change was coming.
I could feel it.
---
The first time I punched someone, I broke two fingers.
It was a mugging—typical alley grab, three-on-one. I didn't use the Force. I didn't need to. They weren't trained. But I hit wrong. Too stiff. Poor angle. One guy's jaw shattered, but so did my hand.
After that, I decided to train properly.
Not Jedi martial forms. Not the refined, sweeping arcs of Ataru or the balanced footwork of Soresu. I studied the undercity. Watched bar fights. Tracked bounty hunters. Learned from ex-soldiers who taught quietly for credits and silence.
And always, the Force guided me.
Not to overpower. Not to kill. Just to control.
I learned to shift weight between breaths. To strike between heartbeats. To feel tension in someone's shoulder and know their next move before it began.
Sometimes I'd enter a flow so deep that it felt like time slowed. That wasn't strength. That was listening.
I trained at night. Shadowboxing in corridors lit by flickering bulbs. Practicing takedowns on sacks of old scrap and flex-foam.
The Force made me faster, but I hid it. Always. Every movement muted. Every surge restrained.
Even when the Force surged—whispering where to step, when to pivot, how to catch a blade without bleeding—I stayed quiet in its current. Like a shadow in water.
To them, I was just another fighter. Just a mechanic who'd learned to scrap.
That's how I wanted it.
---
Now
Marbs' signal routines grew sharper after that Jedi transmission. He started watching more frequencies—quietly, discreetly. Never recording for long, never holding too much at once. Just scanning.
"Insurance," he said. "Patterns."
We moved carefully. Lived the same. But something had changed in both of us.
The Force spoke to me more now. Not in words—never words. But in the silence between machines. In the dust that settled unevenly on one side of a panel. In a cooling pipe that rattled in perfect threes before a relay failed.
There was knowledge here. Buried.
Old paths, old systems, old zones marked as unsafe or forgotten by time.
I wandered.
Sometimes I'd find old Jedi glyphs, etched faintly into ventilation shafts. Nothing grand—just sigils, maybe wayfinders from another era. Sometimes I found the remnants of Orders predating the Republic's current archives—hidden places beneath forgotten temples or shrines to things not taught anymore.
I never took anything. Never disturbed them.
Just listened.
Knowledge still lived here. The Force still remembered.
---
One time, I found an abandoned vault two levels down. Sealed for a century, maybe longer. Inside were carbon-frozen survival rations, unmarked tools, a half-buried survival transmitter tuned to an ancient frequency band that no longer pinged the stars.
Marbs decoded its language over three days. It turned out to be a message to no one—an exile's journal, stored in binary pulses. A Force-sensitive who left the Order long before.
I didn't know her name. But I understood her silence.
---
Sometimes I wondered what the Jedi would say if they found me. If they sensed what I had become.
I wasn't powerful—not in the way they defined it. But I knew things. I moved through the Force without disturbing its waters. I fought when needed. Healed when I could. Survived.
There was power in that, too.
Quiet. Unseen. But real.
---
Later That Week
We received no reply. Not directly.
But news drifted down.
A Jedi extraction team deployed to the Outer Rim. Rumors of a successful recovery. A padawan placed under Temple care. Knight Aven… critical condition, but alive.
Marbs processed the confirmation through four news threads and encrypted Temple chatter.
"She made it," I said.
"You helped," Marbs replied.
I shrugged. "Doesn't change anything."
He hovered close. "It already has."
---
But I stayed.
Fixed power relays. Repaired moisture regulators. Patched droids.
I trained. Read. Listened.
Let the Force speak—but only in whispers.
Only when I was ready.
And when it warned me—of danger, of change, of things shifting in the upper levels—I didn't reach for a weapon.
I just prepared.
Silently.