Riptide

by Paul S. Kemp

  Metallic latches released, a hiss sounded, and he heard a hatch or door open right before him. A blast of cold air goose-pimpled his wet skin.

  He opened his mouth to speak but gagged on the tube. Something took hold of it.

  “Do not resist,” said a mechanical voice, a medical droid.

  He didn’t, and the droid pulled the tube from his body. It went all the way to his stomach, and he felt as if the droid was disemboweling him as it pulled the tube up through his esophagus. The moment it cleared his lips he coughed out a bit of liquid and gasped.

  The intake of air felt raw on his throat. His lungs burned. The smell of antiseptic filled his nostrils. He tried to speak, but his lips and tongue felt thick, his vocal cords tight. He managed only a grunt.

  “You will be able to speak soon,” said a soft, sibilant voice. “You have never used your vocal cords before, or your lungs. Try to remain calm.”

  He was still restrained, his eyes still sealed shut. He felt vulnerable.

  “You are restrained for your own protection,” said the soft voice. “The implantation process is painful. I don’t want you to damage yourself.”

  The word “painful” stuck in his mind. He squirmed against the restraints, but they held him fast.

  “You may go, One-Bee-Seven,” said the voice.

  “Yes, Master Nyss,” replied the droid.

  He heard the whirring servos of a departing droid, the whisk of a door that opened and then closed.

  He was alone with Nyss, who had promised him pain. His heart was racing. Despite the cold, he was sweating, clammy. The smell of his own stink filled his nostrils. His breath was coming fast.

  “You are afraid,” said the voice. “There is nothing to fear. You won’t remember the pain.”

  A hand closed on his jaw and he winced in anticipation of a blow. But a blow did not come. Instead he felt something warm and sharp pressed against his temple. He tried to turn his head away but could not. He grunted, terrified; tried to blink open his eyes against the adhesive but failed.

  He felt a brief prick of pain, then pressure in his temple. A trickle of blood, warm like the fluid in which he’d lived for so long, wound down the side of his face. There really was no pain—

  Then a shooting stab of agony exploded in his head. He shrieked, a prolonged, bestial wail that went on and on but did nothing to expiate the pain. The agony intensified, spreading from his temple to the rest of his head until it felt as if his skull were filled with molten metal that would burn forever.

  His entire body was as rigid as a rail, every muscle contracted. He could not stop screaming. He wanted to cut off his own head, to rip it from his neck and murder himself to end the unending, unendurable pain.

  But his hands were bound and he could not move.

  There was nothing left to him but to scream and scream and scream.

  Horror matched pain when he felt something squirming inside the scalding confines of his skull, writhing tendrils rooting through his brain, scraping against the underside of his braincase. He imagined worms burrowing through tissue, leaving a network of empty tunnels in their wake. He heaved as if to vomit, but his stomach contained nothing.

  Between heaves his screams turned desperate; he warred against the restraints, but they simply would not give. He railed, screamed, shrieked, heaved, knew that he must soon pass out or die, and …

  The pain vanished.

  Sweat soaked him. Every muscle in his body ached. His breath came hard and fast through a throat made ragged. Before he could speak, ask what had happened, a spark shower exploded in his brain and a gout of information poured in, washing away what preexisted it and filling the empty vessel of his mind.

  Memories flooded into the crevices of his empty recollection, making him anew, rebirthing him on the spot.

  He remembered himself.

  He had been born on Coruscant, and his parents had died in an accident when he was young.

  A voice was speaking to him from outside himself, but he could not understand it, could not move his attention from the rush of memories, his memories.

  After the death of his parents, he had turned inward, had become philosophical even as a child, and that internal focus had triggered his latent Force sensitivity.

  The voice continued to speak to him, soft, insistent. But he refused to acknowledge it. Instead he lived in the past, his past, watching faces and events stream by.

  Without any training, he’d used his Force sensitivity to make a lightsaber for himself. Soon thereafter, his uncle had enrolled him in the Jedi Academy. He’d met Grand Master Luke Skywalker.

  The voice finally penetrated his perception.

  “Do you hear me?” it asked.

  He felt a hand tapping his cheeks but ignored it in favor of the memories.

  He’d fought the spirit of Marka Ragnos on Korriban, trying to redeem Rosh Penin.

  “Open your eyes,” the voice said, and tore the adhesive strips from his eyelids.

  He hesitated, unwilling to let himself slip from the realm of memory.

  “Open them.”

  He did, and even the dim light in the small, steel-walled room set them to watering. He blinked, his vision blurred. A figure stood before him, but he could make out little detail.

  “I cannot see,” he said.

  “Your vision will improve quickly,” the figure said.

  He looked around, down, trying to blink away the blurriness. He was in a transparisteel cloning tank. Traces of the pink suspension fluid in which he’d been floating puddled in the base of the tank. He stared at them while his vision cleared.

  Cables, hoses, and wires snaked out of the sides of the tank and connected to his body at arms, legs, torso, and head. Conduits connected a computer to the tank. He was surprised to see that he was not restrained, yet he still could not move.

  A man stood at the computer station. Not a man—an Umbaran, thin, with skin so pale it looked white. He wore a tailored black cloak complete with a cowl, and the dimness in the room seemed to collect around him, intensify near him. The reflected glow of the comp screen made his dark eyes glow red. He worked the keyboard with one hand. In his other he held a device that looked like a metal hilt or handle engraved with strange grooves and from which extended a spike of rigid filaments, each of them far finer than even the finest hair.

  “I cannot move,” he said to the Umbaran, his voice coarse with disuse.

  “The programming paralyzes most of your skeleton-muscular system until the … process is complete.”

  “I cannot feel the Force,” he said.

  The Umbaran nodded. “That is my doing.”

  He did not know what to say to that. He did not remember ever being cut off from the Force. His gaze fell to the device the Umbaran held in his hand. The Umbaran noticed and held the device up for him to see.

  “It is Rakatan,” the Umbaran said. “We think they used it to store and transfer their consciousnesses. We’ve found caches of them here and there across the galaxy.”

  “We?” he asked.

  “The One Sith,” the Umbaran replied.

  He realized his danger then. He was in the hands of an unknown faction of the Sith. He tried to fall into the Force but felt only emptiness. He was alone, powerless. The Sith had developed some new weapon by which they could separate a Jedi from the Force. He had to escape, report back.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “You know my name. Jaden Korr.”

  The Umbaran smiled. “No. You are the Iteration.”

  The word meant nothing to him.

  “I’m going to speak a phrase,” the Umbaran said. “And when I do, you’ll know what you are.”

  He shook his head. Nothing the Umbaran said made sense, nothing about his situation made sense. How had he gotten here? He remembered very little after his graduation from the Jedi Academy.

  The Umbaran smiled, an expression more sinister than mirthful,
and started to speak. He did not comprehend the words. He blinked and … knew.

  He was a clone of Jaden Korr. He was an agent of the One Sith. He was to infiltrate the Jedi Order and be activated when the One Sith deemed the time right.

  “I am … an agent of the One Sith.”

  The Umbaran nodded. “Yes.”

  “Why did you activate me now? I’m not a member of the Jedi Order.”

  “No. But you will be.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will in time. Now, who are you?”

  “I am the Iteration.”

  The Umbaran nodded, hit a key on the comp panel.

  The Iteration was able to move. At the same time, the darkness that seemed to hover around the Umbaran decreased somewhat and the Iteration’s connection to the Force returned in a rush of power that made him gasp.

  The Iteration took a step, another, ginger on limbs that had never before borne his weight. The cloning tank used electro-impulses to stimulate muscle development and growth, but he knew to take care with his first steps.

  Behind the Umbaran, the door to the small chamber slid open and two figures in cowled cloaks strode in. Each towered over the Umbaran, over the Iteration, and both held electro-staffs in their fists. Their red hands featured scales and black claws. The cowls and dim light hid their faces, but the Iteration caught a suggestion of scaled eye ridges above reptilian eyes.

  “Syll is awaiting him aboard my ship,” the Umbaran said to them. “Get him aboard and put him in stasis.”

  “Yes, my lord,” the two answered, their voices deep and guttural.

  “Stasis?” the Iteration said. “But I just …” He struggled for the right word. “… woke up.”

  “I needed to make sure you could withstand the shock of the awakening and the first memory transfer.”

  “The first? And if I would’ve died?”

  The Umbaran shrugged. “I would’ve used another.”

  “Another?”

  “Get him aboard,” the man said to the guards.

  As the guards took him away, he asked over his shoulder, “Why did you awaken me? What am I to do?”

  “Nothing, yet. You’re just along for the ride until I need you.”

  “Until you need me for what?”

  “Until I need you to iterate,” the Umbaran said, and the Iteration imagined the thin line of a smug smile drawn across the Umbaran’s pale face.

  Soldier felt an odd sense of separation, a peculiar sense of otherness. A gulf opened in him, growing as the stolen ship blazed ever farther from the moon.

  The moon had been his birthplace, the place where he had spent his entire life.

  The place he had long ago grown to hate, but that was also his home.

  He felt as if his life up to that moment had been the before, and that he had just begun the after. But the after felt uncomfortably vast. Suddenly adrift in infinite space, in infinite possibilities, he felt as he always had when he was floating in one of Dr. Green’s sensory deprivation tanks—alone, unmoored from himself, a tiny ship bobbing across the surface of a limitless ocean.

  The frigid, unnamed moon and its cloning facility had been the Community’s home for decades. He and the other clones had been specimens for Imperial scientists, living in cages made of transparisteel, their existences an unending series of tests, questions, needles, training.

  It had been awful, but they’d had structure, purpose.

  Now they had neither.

  The scientists had wanted to clone a unique Force user. And they had succeeded, in a way. But their success had been their undoing. The Community had earned their freedom with murder, killing everyone else in the facility and giving them to Mother.

  And now they were riding Seer’s promises into the velvet of space.

  And where would they go?

  First to Fhost.

  Then to Mother.

  Perhaps Soldier’s possibilities were not as infinite as he supposed. Perhaps he had had more purpose, more structure, than he realized.

  The readout showed the ship to be clear of gravity wells. Soldier took one last look around the system, the distant red star, the gas giants.

  Seer entered the cockpit and folded her lithe body into the copilot’s seat. “The universe is large and you feel alone,” she said.

  Soldier tried to hide his surprise. Seer had articulated his thoughts plainly.

  “You don’t need to be alone, Soldier. You separate yourself from us, from Mother. You needn’t.”

  Not for the first time, Soldier wondered if Seer’s empathic sense surpassed that of the rest of the clones.

  “I don’t feel alone,” Soldier lied. “I am one of you. I take care of you, protect you all.”

  “You do so for the children’s sake. Not the rest of us.”

  Once again, Seer had spoken truth. He had no children of his own, but cared for Grace, Gift, and Blessing as if they were his. If the clones had a purpose, the children embodied it. He wanted them to have a life different from the one he and the others had been forced to endure.

  Unwilling to discuss it more with Seer, he changed the subject. “The coordinates for Fhost are in the navicomp and we’re clear of gravity wells. I’m winding up the hyperdrive.”

  Seer stared at him, but he ignored her as he engaged the pre-jump sequence. He reached to engage the cockpit dimmer. His flight training in the facility’s simulators had taught him that staring at the hyperspace churn too often could lead to madness. Seer caught his hand and did not release it.

  “I want to see it,” she said.

  Her touch thrilled him, and he imagined she knew it. “All right.”

  When the jump indicator showed green, he engaged the hyperdrive. Points of starlight stretched into lines, then the lines vanished into the blue swirl of hyperspace.

  Seer gasped, her hand tight around his. “It’s beautiful.”

  The swirls and whorls nauseated Soldier, but he said nothing. As he withdrew his hand, Seer seemed not to notice. Her excitement filled the cockpit.

  “We’ll reach Fhost soon,” he said.

  She nodded, staring wide-eyed at the blue.

  “I’ll check on the others,” he said, and rose. Through their shared connection, he could feel the other clones’ emotional state. They were calmed by the medicine, but that would last only a short time. The madness cast a shadow over their minds, the illness a shadow over their failing bodies.

  He hoped Seer was right. He hoped Mother would heal them. Especially the children.

  SEER SAT IN THE COCKPIT, STARING OUT, DURING THEIR entire time in hyperspace. Her silence unnerved Soldier. She eyed the starstreaks, unblinking, as if they hid something revelatory in their glow. He occupied himself by running diagnostics on the ship’s systems while he waited for the computer to tell him they were nearing Fhost.

  In time it did, and he said, “Coming out of hyperspace.”

  Seer finally looked away from the view outside and fixed her gaze on him. He could not shake the feeling that she saw right through him. The zeal of a true believer filled her dark eyes. Or maybe it was madness; Soldier could not distinguish them.

  “Well done, Soldier,” she said.

  They came out of hyperspace, black overwrote blue, and the light of a nearby star painted the interior of the cockpit in orange. The ion engines engaged and they accelerated through the system.

  Soldier had no idea what to expect on-planet.

  “The data on Fhost show it to be sparsely populated, with only one large city—Farpoint. We’ll go in on the far side of the planet and circle around. There’s not much infrastructure. We should be able to avoid detection. I’ll set us down outside of the city and some of us can head in.”

  Seer nodded, lost in thought, or maybe lost in another vision, as they closed on the planet.

  Fhost floated in the space before them, a mostly brown ball dotted with intermittent spots of green and blue. Hazy clouds floated in long, thin strings above
the arid world. Soldier guided the cloakshape around to the far side of the planet. He kept his eyes on the scanners, wondering if they’d be interdicted, wondering what he would do if they were, but either they passed into the atmosphere unnoticed or the planetary authorities saw them and did not care.

  He took the cloakshape down and flew low and fast along Fhost’s surface. He could make out little detail, blurs of green and brown and blue. Still, he found it beautiful, a stark contrast to the frozen hell that had been their lives for so long. He wondered what it would be like to simply settle on such a world and just … live.

  He imagined Grace and Blessing as adults, living in a normal dwelling, living normal lives. The thought made him smile. He cleared his throat, ventured a heretical thought.

  “We could just … settle here,” he said. He wasn’t sure Seer heard him.

  “She is calling us, Soldier,” Seer said, her voice singsong. “She wants us home. We must hurry.”

  Her words dispelled any thoughts of a life lived in quietude.

  After a time, the HUD showed Farpoint a bit over fifty kilometers ahead. He sought a suitable landing spot. There were no signs off habitation nearby, so he slowed and settled the cloakshape in a large clearing in the center of a wood.

  “I’ll get what meds I can and come back as fast as I can,” he said. “I’ll need help, though.”

  Seer said nothing. Though her eyes were open, she still seemed lost in a trance.

  “Seer? Seer?”

  He left her in the cockpit and headed to the cargo bay. The other clones had moved little since he’d last checked them. The medicine coated their minds with an artificial calm and dulled the pain of their bodies, but through their shared mental connection he could feel the growing madness in the adults, roiling underneath the surface. Absent the medication, he imagined, the ship would be chaos. The medicine would work for another hour or two, at most. Then the madness would assert itself, or the illness. Either way, there would be death. He had to move fast.

  He went to each of the clones in turn, the children first, evaluating their physical state, opening his mind enough to get a better feel for their emotional condition. All were flush with fever, their breathing too rapid, their minds seething with anger, terror, power. Blessing, Grace, and Gift were catatonic. He lingered over them, feeling a sadness that hit him hard. He had to save them, them above all.