TAKE THIS J0B AND SHOVE IT

by ardavenport

Grazora Quoar had just started her shift when the Jedi showed up.

Normally she would have been sitting in the gatehouse control room, watching the sentry droids interrogating whoever arrived. But she was inspecting them, part of her usual morning rounds. Usually, Kamlar Huffly would have stayed in the gatehouse, but she had to leave early after the night shift. Quoar let her go. If TuriTac-Sec Corp was too cheap to have two people on duty to guard the city's Tertiary Archive site, Quoar wasn't going to penalize a good worker for having a family emergency.

She had just closed up the access panel on the back of the droid's head when she spotted, over the droid's shoulder, the Jedi coming up to the gate.

Quoar had never met a Jedi. Never seen one in person. But in her two decades of police and security work, she had certainly heard about them. Now that she had seen one, she was surprised that this one was so blatantly obvious.

The long, loose dark brown robe might have blended into a crowd. Tall brown boots and brown pants were common enough. An unremarkable Human, of late middle years with long brown hair, tied back, beard and mustaches, normally would not attract attention. The off-white tunic with strips of cloth wrapped around the middle and hanging down over the shoulders was a bit distinctive. Add the wide brown belt with utility pouches with a very obvious lightsaber attached to it and the whole ensemble said, 'Jedi'.

Quoar activated the droid. It snapped to attention, armored barrel chest thrust forward, and joined Tor-33B, which was already scrutinizing the approaching Jedi. The pair stayed at loose attention, their weapons down, eye sensors recording every detail. Tor-33A and Tor-33B were not programmed to be aggressive. Unless someone tried to pass through the gate without permission.

"Hello."

The Jedi stopped a few paces away and looked at them with a benign smile. He was tall, eye level with Quoar, she noted. And broad in the shoulders.

"I was hoping that - - -"

That was as far as he got.

An official car sped up and stopped. Hurlo Naquur leaped out. Quoar's least favorite Deputy Mayor.

"You! Take him!" Naquur shouted, red-faced and angrier than usual, arms and green sleeve-tails waving as he struggled out of the car before the driver had time to lower it to the curb.

Quoar stared. Looked at the Jedi, who remained calm and relaxed. Looked at the Deputy Mayor, stumbling forward in his pointed shoes. Naquur halted, just out of the Jedi's reach, and puffed himself up.

"I said take him! He's trying to get into the Archive!" Naquur panted.

Agitated, Tor-33A and Tor-33B clicked and whirred, their eye sensors looking to Quoar for guidance. They recognized the Deputy Mayor's sash, but they were only part of a contract security company hired by the province. She held up a gloved hand for them to stay in place.

"You don't have any authority here, Naquur," Quoar replied, working hard to keep the pleasure out of her voice. Her failure to show the proper 'loyalty' to the newest city administration had terminated her position in the city police force. And her pension. Her current contract job kept her up on the payments of her condo. Just. But after working over three years for TuriTac-Sec Corp she had yet to be promoted to supervisor. Her performance reviews always noted 'Attitude Issues' as being a problem, though the company seemed to have no problem with assigning her the tasks of a supervisor. Just none of the authority. Or the pay.

"The city can cancel your contract in a heartbeat, you know." Naquur pointed threateningly. Quoar was now quite certain that he did not know her name, or that she had ever worked for the city. Otherwise his threats would have been more specific.

"I'm sure that my bosses at TuriTac-Sec will be very disappointed if that happens. . . . . Sir," Quoar remembered to add.

"He cannot be allowed inside the Archive. There is sensitive data in there!" Naquur shouted.

Quoar looked at the Jedi. He actually hadn't tried to get past the gate. He hadn't even been standing there long enough to call it loitering.

"I have no interest in your data, however I believe that there are other things of significant interest stored there," the Jedi said in a smooth Coruscant accent.

Quoar looked through the bars of the gate toward the gray tower squatting in the center of the neatly trimmed grounds. Then back at the Jedi.

"I.D.?"

The Jedi produced a flat I.D. card from a side pouch while Quoar slipped her data reader from her belt. As soon at the I.D. went into the slot the little screen lit up with the hottest priorities that Quoar had ever seen. She took a moment to admire them. Beyond the holo and "Qui-Gon Jinn: Jedi Master" were Galactic Senate Privileges, Interplanetary Judiciary Authority, Diplomatic Immunity. . . .

"This looks in order." Quoar handed it back. She unclipped the key-controller from her belt and clicked the access code. The gate thunked and began rumbling open.

"You can't!"

Naquur rushed forward and then nervously back as if bouncing off of an invisible danger zone around the Jedi.

"He can't go in there! You have to do something!"

Quoar looked at the Jedi. She pointed a stern finger at him.

"Don't make a mess."

She tossed him the key-controller. Without even looking, he caught it neatly with one hand.

"I shall endeavor to be tidy," he said with a polite, shallow bow.

Naquur started hopping.

"Stop him! Shoot him! I order you!" he shouted at the droids, clutching the seal or his official sash and holding it up. The machines dithered, partially raising their heavy blaster arms, snicking indecisively. They recognized the authority but not whether it applied to them.

Click! Click!

The Jedi looked at the key-controller as if shutting off droids was a novelty. Perhaps it was, for him. Quoar was just glad that he was so quick to figure out the controls. She had seen holos of what Jedi could do to droids and she liked Tor-33A and B.

"We'll see about this!" Naquur shook his fist and scurried back to his car.

"Hmm." The Jedi shrugged, turned and purposefully strode through the gate toward the Archive.

Left alone again, Quoar went back up to her gatehouse, shutting the gate and re-activating the droids on the way. She didn't see the Jedi when she surveyed the grounds; he had disappeared inside the building. Sitting at the computer she tapped out a simple resignation declaration. She certainly did not expect to remain an employee of TuriTac-Sec Corp, not after Naquur complained to the company bosses.

Quoar finished her notice with as few words and as much attitude as she could. It was absolutely absurd for her to deny a Jedi anything. Aside from the fact that they had the law on their side, she doubted that she could come even close to doing any more than inconveniencing him. Quoar was large and broad with strong hands; she kept herself in good, fighting trim and she trained at the blaster range regularly, but that didn't even come close to what a Jedi was supposed to be able to do. Super speed, strength, expertly wielded lightsabers that could cut through nearly anything. And they were supposed to have mind powers. Quoar did not want to find out what those really were.

She looked toward the Archive building again, but there was nothing more exciting than a few wild winged thelks pecking around the shrubs by the entrance.

Of course, Quoar knew that the city was storing more than data chits in there. She didn't ask what. That was just how the city ran. It always had. But the current administration was quite a bit more serious about it than usual.

She scanned the perimeter screens and the interior sensors. There was nothing going on. Except that the Jedi had gotten down into the sub-sub-basement. Even Quoar hadn't seen what was down there. None of her security key-codes went any further than the ground floor and the two levels over that.

With everything quiet, she looked up the work-available listings on the public com. More than half of them in her range of expertise were for the province or city. She knew she wouldn't get any of those, not with the Deputy Mayor and who-knows-who-else against her. She copied a few prospects into a private file. They were only short term, but did not require relocation.

The perimeter alert blared. Going back to her screens, she saw a spray of approaching dots. She looked up in time to see a swarm of black droid darts whizzing over the fence. They didn't belong to TuriTac-Sec. She pressed the alarm.

Nothing happened.

She activated all the lockdowns.

Her status lights remained green.

Except for the blinking override command from the TuriTac-Sec office. Quoar supposed that Deputy Mayor Naquur had more power than she thought.

The interior sensors of the Archive showed that the Jedi had traveled all the way up to the top level, where the droid darts circled. A window exploded where one of them dove in, blasters firing. The others swirled and followed in a neat line.

Quoar swivelled her chair back to the Archive security controls. Everything was overridden from the head office. She couldn't even open the front gate. Tor-33A and B stood at their posts, but Quoar knew she couldn't trust them now. She got up and went to the door.

It wouldn't open.

Snarling at it, she backed up, drew her weapon and fired.

She shot the lock off, but that just jammed it shut. She had to use a dozen more shots to destroy enough of the window in the door to make an opening big enough to climb out through.

As quietly as possible, she went down the stairs to the ground level. Peeking around the corner, she saw the back of Tor-33B. She silently slipped out, back pressed to the wall, hit the deactivation switch from behind and darted back to cover.

"Malfunction! Malfunction!" Tor-33A called out, whirring and clicking toward its companion. Quoar didn't know how she was going to get the second droid without shooting it, which would have been a bad idea since they had distributed control and power systems so her simple hand weapon couldn't be counted on disabling it unless she got a lucky shot with an overload. She needed heavier fire power, like the droid's own blasters and she didn't have it.

Quoar heard a pair of small feet running toward the gate.

"Halt! Halt!"

Tor-33A fired.

Quoar saw a small brown figure go by and a blue-white flash. Then she heard a low erratic electric hum and crashing, squealing sounds like something being torn apart. Then silence.

Quoar peeked around the wall again. Just in time to see Tor-33B's upper half topple and clatter to the duracrete, the metal innards still glowing red hot and spilling over the wreckage of Tor-33A. The air reeked of burnt plastoids and metal.

A Human boy stood over the droid pile, an activated lightsaber held with both small hands. He wore almost the same clothes as the Jedi who was in the Archive now. But this one was small and skinny, with short, thick hair and a smooth youngling's face.

"Why did you do that?" Quoar demanded. "I deactivated B so I wouldn't have to shoot it."

TTTTTTHHHHHHRRRRUUUUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!

The explosion knocked Quoar to the ground, but she was able to get her arms up to protect her head. A hail of bits and chunks rained down, but the wall blocked most of it.

Ears ringing, she slowly shakily climbed to her feet. The Jedi boy did the same. He had deactivated his lightsaber, but still clutched the device in his hand.

Quoar peered through the gate at the enormous cloud of gray smoke slowly rising up from the massive pile of rubble that used to be the Tertiary Archive Tower.

The Jedi ran toward her. He didn't bother with the gate, just launched himself into the air, sailing high over it to land on his feet.

"Qui-Gon!" the boy exclaimed.

Quoar looked back at the rubble pile. The droid darts didn't seem to have made it out. Behind her, the Jedi had turned to leave with a casualness that stunned Quoar as much as the destruction.

"You made a mess!" she shouted.

Qui-Gon Jinn stopped and stared at her, his robe dusted gray in places, his hair hanging down over his shoulders, hand on the boy's shoulder.

"Look at that mess!" She pointed at the former building.

The boy opened his mouth in a silent 'O'. But he looked surprised by her, not at the remnants of the massive explosion settling at the center of the landscaped grounds. Was this normal for them, she wondered.

"I guess that's what I'm going to have to tell everybody. I let the Jedi in, 'cause he said he wouldn't make a mess. But nooooo. There it is." She waved her arm behind her.

Again, Quoar looked at the preposterous destruction and then back at the perpetrator.

"That's huge! That mess is so big, people are going come around from all the five provinces to look at it and say, 'Look here at this huge mess. The Jedi made that!'

"That's just what I'm going have to say to them when they come. Ooooh, don't let those Jedi in. They're messy!"

She waved her arms in no direction at all. She wondered if she went home now maybe everyone would be too busy to send anyone after her. But she doubted that she would be forgotten. The city administration was known for its grudges.

Qui-Gon Jinn's surprised expression collapsed, so Quoar, feeling a little crazed and wondering what really was 'normal' for a Jedi, kept going.

"But noooo. Other Jedi will come here and say, 'Look at that mess! It's not BIG ENOUGH!' And they'll make MORE!"

Qui-Gon Jinn was laughing into his sleeve now with a big, broad smile on his face. The boy just kept looking from her back up to his companion.

"They'll have to put up a plaque, too. And a big flashing holo-sign. 'Big Jedi Mess. RIGHT HERE!' And they'll bring younglings from school and show it to them and tell them, 'Don't you be Jedi, or you'll be MESSY!'"

The boy now urgently tugged on his elder's sleeve and Qui-Gon Jinn regained control of himself.

"You should come with us. I don't believe it's safe for you to stay."

The boy rolled his eyes up at the sky with the pained look of sorely abused youth whose elders had no sense and would probably soon embarrass them.

"You think?" Quoar holstered her weapon and went to them. "I'm not keeping this job anyway. And I won't miss it."

The Jedi turned in the direction of the city center.

"Hey!" Quoar shouted. They stopped, looking back at her.

"I have a transport." She pointed toward the parking corral down the street from the Archive grounds.

"Oh," Qui-Gon Jinn noted. They ran together.

"We only need to reach the Provincial Magistrate's office. The Planetary Security will handle everything from there," Qui-Gon Jinn explained as they scrambled into Quoar's red speeder. It was only a two-seater, but the boy was small and scrunched in between them.

"Only if they take out the whole city government," Quoar noted, starting the engine.

"That will very likely happen," Qui-Gon Jinn noted.

"Really?" Quoar backed out into the street, turned and soon they were gliding over it and gaining speed. She thought that she heard the whine of emergency sirens heading toward the Archive, but she was no longer being paid to care. She thought it likely that the company would back-date her firing so they could short her pay as much as possible. "Is this anything I might need to testify in court about?"

Qui-Gon Jinn thought about that for a moment; Obi-Wan Kenobi looked from one to the other of them and pulled on the parts of his robe trapped under the large bodies on either side of him.

"Possibly," he finally said.

Quoar held up a warning hand. "Then don't tell me anymore. I really don't want to spoil this," she said with a grin.

With pleasure, she turned onto the expressway ramp. The rest of the traffic was light. As they accelerated, Quoar asked the Jedi about giving her a reference for her next job. If the city government was turning over, there would likely be some good openings.

O === END === O

This story first posted on tf.n: 28-Nov-2008

Disclaimer: All characters and situations belong to George and Lucasfilm; I'm just playing in their sandbox.