Riptide

by Paul S. Kemp

  A soft rustle, then, “Not long.”

  Nyss’s voice was as soft as a pillow.

  Wyyrlok turned in his chair to face him.

  The darkness in the hallway seemed deeper than usual, like ink, and Nyss Nenn stood in the midst of the pitch, his form lost in the shadows, his hairless face and head floating like a pale moon in the darkness. All Umbarans, born on a dim planet shrouded in darkness, lived in shadow. But Nyss seemed of shadow. He was not a Force user, not in the ordinary sense. But he was attuned to the Force somehow. Perhaps the Master knew the nature of Nyss’s relationship to the Force, but Wyyrlok did not; it was beyond his comprehension. What he did know was that Nyss’s presence, and that of his twin sister, Syll, could disrupt a Force sensitive’s connection to the Force. Nyss and Syll were unique among Umbarans and one of the greatest weapons the One Sith possessed. They could turn a Force user into an ordinary sentient.

  Wyyrlok stared past Nyss at the darkness of the hall, looking for Syll.

  “My sister isn’t with me,” Nyss said.

  Wyyrlok found that hard to believe. The two were rarely apart. Their relationship was odd, psychologically symbiotic.

  Lightning split the sky, casting the room in a flash of lurid light. Nyss winced in the sudden illumination. Wyyrlok took comfort in the Umbaran’s discomfort. Despite Nyss’s power, light disquieted him.

  “Sit,” Wyyrlok said, and gestured at a chair, though not the one nearest him. “And do not use your power in my presence. I find it … irritating.”

  “I should think,” Nyss said. He inclined his head, and the pain in Wyyrlok’s skull slowly faded. The Umbaran glided into the room, as silent as a ghost, and slid into a chair. His eyes fell on the case.

  “Do you feel it?” Wyyrlok asked, nodding at the case.

  “You know I don’t,” said Nyss.

  “I know you can’t,” said Wyyrlok.

  Nyss simply stared, and Wyyrlok continued: “The Master has a task for you. Therefore you should see this.”

  Wyyrlok replayed the vid from the point at which Douro set down on the moon. He wanted to see if Nyss’s conclusions matched his own.

  Nyss’s eyes, set deep in shadowed sockets, shone in the glare of the vid, his pupils enormous. “That facility postdates the sites we found previously,” he said, watching as Douro entered the facility.

  “I agree. And therefore it is of importance to the Master.”

  Though Nyss had suppressed his power, Wyyrlok still found proximity to the Umbaran distasteful. The Force connected all living things and was powered by all living things, yet Nyss and his sister seemed to exist outside of the Force somehow. They were holes, gaps in the network of life, alive to ordinary senses, but dead to the Force. It was as if Nyss was dead.

  The two of them watched as Douro moved deeper into the abandoned cloning facility. They saw him beat a human male and leave him lying there, his face shattered, bleeding.

  “He is not dead,” Nyss observed.

  “Indeed not,” Wyyrlok said, knowing that the human male ultimately killed Douro.

  “That was a mistake,” Nyss said.

  “More than you know.”

  Nyss watched the recording. Wyyrlok watched Nyss.

  After a few more moments, Nyss asked, “The Master believes there’s technology of value in the facility?”

  The One Sith had spent decades plundering Thrawn-era cloning facilities, plumbing their secrets. They’d taken Thrawn’s secret technology and improved it markedly, in part by using the Rakatan biotechnology contained in the metal case. They’d also learned the purpose of the Grand Admiral’s program. The fact that he had actually accomplished his goal, and that no one but the One Sith knew even after so many years, made Thrawn’s plan and its execution all the more impressive. Of course, the Grand Admiral had never seen the final stages of the plan come to fruition—he’d been killed soon after placing the clone on Coruscant. It had fallen to the One Sith to complete the Grand Admiral’s plot.

  “Wyyrlok,” Nyss said, “there is technology there?”

  “Darth Wyyrlok,” Wyyrlok corrected. “Do not forget your place, Umbaran. And not technology, as such, no.”

  “Then what?”

  “Continue to watch.”

  Nyss watched intently as the rest of the recording played. Even at only a meter away from Wyyrlok, the Umbaran merged so well with the darkness in the chamber that his outline blurred into the shadows. He seemed to amplify the darkness and to wear it like a shroud.

  Nyss leaned forward when Jaden Korr came on-screen. The Jedi was in the midst of combat with a savage-looking human male wearing tattered clothing and wielding a red lightsaber. They fought on the edge of a deep pit in the floor of a large room. Douro must have been watching the combat from the darkness, unseen by the combatants.

  “That is a third-generation Spaarti cloning cylinder,” Nyss said. “Nothing we haven’t seen before.”

  Wyyrlok froze the picture, centered it on the savage male’s features, and magnified. Long white hair half-covered a strong-jawed, angular face.

  “Do you recognize the features?”

  Nyss shook his head.

  “That is a clone of Jedi Master Kam Solusar.”

  Realization dawned on Nyss’s face. “So it is. Thrawn cloned a Jedi.”

  “Thrawn cloned multiple Jedi and Sith. There, in that facility. Therefore …”

  Nyss finished for him. “… it may be where Thrawn birthed one of the final clones for the project. Given the dates suggested by its architecture and power signature, and the fact that the Solusar clone survived so long without succumbing to illness, I’d say it’s likely. We could be looking at the facility where Thrawn grew the Prime. We should investigate it.”

  Wyyrlok shook his head, causing his lethorns—fleshy growths that hung from each side of his head and terminated in long, slender horns like those on the top of his head—to sway. “The Jedi Jaden Korr will have notified the Order by now. Skywalker will send an investigative team to the moon. We cannot risk exposure. Therefore, we will never know if the mole was grown there.”

  “We could infiltrate it, Syll and I. Even with Skywalker’s team there. You know that we can.”

  Wyyrlok did not doubt it. “The Master deems that too dangerous. Besides, there is no need. Other clones escaped.”

  Nyss fixed his dark eyes on him—dead eyes, the pupils black holes. “You’re certain?”

  “Douro’s ship has a beacon that relays not only its location but the number of life-forms aboard.”

  “How many?”

  “Eleven were aboard when the ship left the moon. There are nine, now.”

  “They are dying,” Nyss said.

  “Or they killed two of their number.”

  Nyss ran a hand over his bald head, his excitement palpable. “You want me to find them. See if a Prime is among them?”

  “We do. But there is more of interest. Watch.”

  Wyyrlok let the tape play, and they watched the combat between Jaden Korr and the Solusar clone. The lightsabers, green and red, made blurred wedges in the air.

  “Jaden Korr fights well,” Nyss said.

  Wyyrlok shrugged.

  Eventually Korr lost three fingers as the Solusar clone disarmed him and drove him into the cloning cylinder. For a moment, the recording lost the combat. But Douro must have circled and moved closer to get a view of the interior of the cylinder. There, they saw Korr on his knees, his left hand held before his face and—

  “Freeze it there,” Nyss said, half-standing and staring at the screen. For a moment, he lost control of his power, and a headache flared in Wyyrlok’s skull.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Nyss asked. “Magnify.”

  Wyyrlok already knew what it was, but it pleased him that Nyss saw it and understood the implications.

  He centered the image on Korr’s hand and magnified.

  Bolts of Force lightning extended from his fingertips, jagged green lines summoned by fear
or anger.

  Outside, ordinary lightning split the sky. Thunder rumbled.

  “He is falling,” Nyss observed in a whisper. He retook control of his power. “It is too soon, isn’t it?”

  His headache gone, Wyyrlok nodded. “The Master did not expect him to fall so readily. Therefore, you will find him, too.”

  “And?”

  Wyyrlok nodded at the case of mindspears on the table. “And do what needs to be done.”

  Nyss clucked his tongue on the roof of his mouth, then nodded slowly, already planning. “Korr will hunt the clones,” he said. “We may be able to complete both tasks at once.”

  “I thought the same thing,” Wyyrlok said, then added, “Therefore the Master wishes you to take an Iteration.”

  Nyss turned in his chair and faced him full on. Looking at the Umbaran’s smooth, expressionless face, Wyyrlok felt the true otherness of Nyss. He was unlike the Sith, unlike the Jedi, unlike anyone else in the universe save his sister.

  “Awake?” Nyss asked.

  “Yes, but in stasis until everything is ready.” Wyyrlok slid the case across the table to Nyss. “There are two spikes in the case. One blank for later. And one basic to be used now, to awaken the Iteration.”

  Nyss laid his pale hands on the case. “It’s up to date?”

  “Up to date enough,” Wyyrlok said. “You know how valuable these are. We have few left. The Iteration’s appearance, his grooming, has been matched to that of the mole.”

  “When should we leave?” Nyss asked.

  “Immediately. The beacon on Douro’s ship shows that a course has been set for Fhost.”

  Nyss rose, tucked the case under his arm. “We can leave within the hour. Let’s go, Syll.”

  Nyss smiled at Wyyrlok as Syll slipped from the shadows on the other side of the room and threw back her hood. Her smile was a tight, slightly upturned curl of lips that never reached her dark eyes. Like her brother, she was pale and slightly built. Short black hair haloed the pale oval of her face.

  It occurred to Wyyrlok that Nyss had not lost control of his power during the conversation. Probably Syll had been toying with Wyyrlok.

  Wyyrlok licked his lips and tried to keep the surprise and anger from his face. He must have looked at her and past her several times during the briefing.

  “You tread dangerously,” he said, and his hand fell to his lightsaber.

  Nyss only smiled. He stood, bowed, collected the case, and glided out of the room with his sister.

  After they’d gone, Wyyrlok rewound the recording back to the point at which Kell was in orbit around the moon. The recording showed a ship in the distance, a huge blade-shaped dreadnought bristling with weapons. Wyrrlock had never seen one like it. The One Sith’s technicians had analyzed the images and concluded that it was a craft modeled on an ancient Sith design. Wyyrlok wondered what else had happened in the system and what had happened to the ship.

  Outside, the storm raged.

  * * *

  She could not recall a particular moment when she had become self-aware. Sentience had not occurred in a revelatory flash. Instead it had come in a series of gradual steps, a long climb up from darkness to light, from thing to person.

  In that way, she became self-aware.

  She did not know how long it had taken. Back then she’d had little sense of time. But she surmised, now, that it had taken millennia.

  After awareness of herself came awareness of the Force. She mistook it as her own power at first, but soon understood that she was of the Force, but was not herself the Force. Perhaps she had been the Force once, but self-awareness had severed her from it, put an irrevocable barrier between the Force and her self-aware mind. The price of her sentience was solitude. The Force existed separately from her, surrounded her, connected her to the outside, but it was not her and she was not it.

  In that way, she came to realize that her existence was not the universe.

  Gradually she learned that she could perceive things through the Force, things from the outside. She remembered feeling impulses she later understood to be feelings, the feelings of others who existed on the outside.

  She’d wrestled with the idea of others for a long while, not understanding how thinking things could exist outside of her own perception. But they did. The feelings were not hers, but they echoed hers. She later learned names for them.

  In that way, she came to understand frustration and anger.

  Over time, she’d come to know her own power. And her own limitations. She was bound, trapped in a prison made of lines and spirals and coils, a geometry of bondage with only the dead for company. She had been created and her creators had trapped her. Her consciousness was bound in a structure that circled back on itself and left her no way to escape. She could perceive the outside, but it was beyond her reach. The others had forms, bodies; they could move. She could not.

  Her anger and frustration grew.

  In her desperation, she reached out through the Force, casting her feelings out into the universe, millions of threads in all directions, in hopes that one of those on the outside would perceive her, would help her. From time to time over the millennia she felt a connection and rejoiced, but always the connection was too dull, too diffuse for her to communicate her needs. Help did not come. She was not understood, and in time the connection with the various others ended, unconsummated. Still she tried, century after century, millennium after millennium, occasionally touching one mind or another, taking what solace she could in that small contact. But the partial meeting of her needs did not dilute her frustration and anger; it intensified it. And frustration and anger grew until she knew a new feeling.

  In that way, she came to hate.

  She hated her solitude. She hated her prison. She hated the others, who had freedom when she did not.

  And then something had changed, perhaps in her, perhaps in the outside. She connected to a being on the outside, a more thorough connection than ever before. She had reveled in the purity of emotion they’d shared, in the mutual understanding. The other called herself Seer and she had others with her, and they, like her, were alone in the universe. They, like her, were in pain.

  I will help you, she told Seer. I will end your pain. Come to me.

  Seer called her “Mother” and promised to come.

  In that way, she came to hope. But her rage went unabated.

  * * *

  While Khedryn returned to the cockpit, Jaden found privacy in an auxiliary communications room with a subspace transceiver. He linked his portacomp to the transceiver, went through a series of secure protocols, input his ID code, and opened a channel. Then, he waited.

  In time, Grand Master Skywalker’s soft but commanding voice, disembodied and ghostly, reached across the light-years. “Jaden. We had begun to worry. Are you all right?”

  “I am now, Master Skywalker.”

  “I can feel that, Jaden. Something in you has changed, and changed for the better. There is a calmness in you that I haven’t sensed for a very long time. Master Katarn, especially, will be glad to know that.”

  The words pleased Jaden. “Will you tell Master Katarn that I understand now, that I looked for dragons but found none?”

  “Should I know what that means?”

  Jaden smiled. “No, but I think he will.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “And please accept my apology for the manner of my departure. I should have filed a flight plan.”

  “Yes, you should’ve. I imagine there is a good explanation?”

  “There is an explanation. Whether it is good isn’t for me to say.”

  “Tell me,” Luke said.

  For the next quarter hour, Jaden told Master Skywalker everything, a confession that, once started, he could not have stopped had he wanted to. The words poured out of him. He told Luke of his deed during the battle of Centerpoint Station, the alienation he’d felt afterward, the Force Vision he’d received and acted upon without the Order’s sanct
ion. He told him of Khedryn, Marr, the Anzat, Relin, and the ancient Sith ship, and, finally, the escaped clones.

  “The Sith ship and its cargo are destroyed? Completely?”

  “Yes. I will send the moon’s coordinates to you so that a team can investigate the facility.”

  “Very good. And the clone you fought, Alpha, appeared to be grown from the DNA of Master Solusar?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see any of the other clones?”

  “No. Not in person.”

  “In your vision, then?”

  Jaden swallowed. He did not want to open old wounds for Master Skywalker. The real Mara Jade Skywalker had been his wife and she had been murdered by Darth Caedus. But he did not want to withhold information. He’d been doing that for too long. Besides, the Grand Master would sense any evasion.

  “I saw no faces in the Force Vision, Master Skywalker, but I heard voices that I thought I recognized.”

  “Whose?”

  “Lumiya, Lessin, and … Mara.”

  Jaden blanched, expecting some kind of outburst. Instead, Luke said nothing, and a gulf of silence hung between them for long moments. Jaden imagined the Jedi Master inhaling deeply, eyes closed.

  “Thank you, Jaden.”

  “I … do not understand, Master Skywalker. Thank you for what?”

  “For telling me everything. The dark side lives in secrets kept. Remember that.”

  “I will.”

  “Now I want you to find the clones. If they’re all users of the dark side, as was the case with the Solusar clone, you may have no choice but to destroy them.”

  “I know. Master Skywalker, there is one other thing—”

  “Hold a moment, Jaden.”

  The connection went silent for a time as Luke attended to something on his end.

  “Sorry for the interruption, Jaden. And now you wish to ask me if you can train Marr Idi Shael. Am I mistaken?”

  The Grand Master’s words took Jaden aback. Despite his age and experience, Jaden always felt like an apprentice when interacting with Luke Skywalker.

  “I … you … no. I mean, yes. I mean … how did you know that?”

  “I listened to your words when you spoke of him. He is quite old to begin training, Jaden. He will never be a full Jedi and there is danger in half-measures.”