Riptide

by Paul S. Kemp

  “We’ll see,” Soldier answered.

  Nyss loosed his grip on his suppressive field. The lights in the hallway and cockpit dimmed slightly as he extended his power which always manifested in a cloud of dark air, like a black fog.

  “Did the lights just dim?” Soldier asked.

  Seer made no answer that Nyss could hear.

  Nyss intensified the field slowly, incrementally separating the clones from the Force. If he was lucky, they would notice only when it was too late.

  The hole in which he existed extended outward from him, deepened, darkened. He felt Seer slipping into it, her connection to the rest of the universe slowly draining away. Soldier, too, fell into it, but only partially. Soldier lingered around the rim, and Nyss was unable to fully sever his connection to the Force.

  Odd. Nyss had never before felt resistance to his power.

  Perhaps Thrawn actually had cloned a breakthrough Force user.

  “Are you all right?” Soldier asked Seer. Nyss heard growing suspicion in his tone.

  “Something … is wrong,” Seer said.

  Nyss heard a gasp, a muffled thump. He imagined Seer falling to the floor.

  “I don’t feel Mother,” Seer said, her voice soft, despondent.

  A high-pitched scream from right behind Nyss made him spin around. The girl, her wild red hair haloing a terrified expression, stared wide-eyed at him, one hand raised to her mouth.

  How had she sneaked up on him?

  He raised his vibroblade for a throw, but the girl turned and ran before he could loose it.

  “Grace!” he heard Soldier shout from the cockpit. The hum and sizzle of an activating lightsaber broke the quiet.

  Nyss cursed, whirled, and flung the stun grenade blindly, just as Soldier pelted through the cockpit door, red blade and red anger going before him.

  Nyss looked away and covered his ears as the grenade exploded with a bright flash and a bang loud enough to almost shatter eardrums. The moment it went off, he drew his other blade and assumed a fighting posture.

  Soldier, caught in the tail end of the grenade’s effect, staggered from the blast, wincing.

  Nyss bounded toward him and shouldered him into the bulkhead. While Soldier grunted from the impact, Nyss stabbed his vibroblade into the clone’s right forearm. He kept the cut clean and avoided slicing through bone. He did not want Soldier dead, just manageable.

  Soldier’s grunt turned to a shout of pain, blood poured from the wound, and he dropped his lightsaber, as Nyss had intended.

  Still pressing his body against Soldier’s, Nyss kicked the weapon away. He thought the fight was over, but the clone, only partially affected by Nyss’s power, unleashed a Force-augmented punch to the side of Nyss’s face.

  Instinct and training saved Nyss. He rolled with the blow, which otherwise would have shattered his jaw. Instead, it merely staggered him, knocking him back two steps and loosening a couple teeth.

  “If you’ve hurt Grace …” Soldier said, shaking his head as if to clear it. Blood poured from the cut on his arm. Rage poured from everywhere else.

  Nyss had never before fought a Force user who actually could use the Force in his presence. He knew that surprise was the sole reason he had the upper hand at the moment.

  Knowing he could not let up, he took a chance, putting his head down and charging the clone. The Prime braced himself, then slammed a fist down on Nyss’s back, the power in the blow cracking Nyss’s ribs.

  Nyss endured the pain, grabbed the clone around his legs, and heaved him to the floor. They hit the deck in a tangled heap, punching and clawing at each other. The clone’s blood smeared Nyss’s face, turned the grapple into a slick, sticky mess.

  Nyss struggled to keep his suppressive field in effect, to intensify it, but instead of him pulling Soldier into the hole, Soldier, fueled by his anger, seemed to be pulling Nyss out of it, dragging his existence into the light. Nyss had lived in his hole so long, his existence separate from all but his sister, that the thought of a forced connection to others nearly caused him to panic.

  His terror met Soldier’s anger and each held the other in balance, Soldier’s powers weakened but not entirely suppressed, Nyss’s solitary existence threatened but preserved.

  Nyss clawed at Soldier’s eyes, and Soldier turned his head to the side. Nyss slammed his head into Soldier’s face—once, a second time. He felt Soldier’s nose give way, felt the spray of blood as the nose exploded.

  But Soldier did not lose consciousness. With his good hand, he clawed at Nyss’s eye, got a finger into the socket. Panicked, Nyss whipped his head to the side, dislodged the finger, and slammed his head down into the clone’s face. The blow caused Nyss to see sparks but fully shattered the Prime’s already broken nose. Bone crunched. More blood sprayed. The clone, momentarily stunned, went limp.

  Nyss snaked an arm free of the clone’s grasp, reversed his grip on his vibroblade, and slammed the hilt into the side of Soldier’s head.

  The Prime groaned and went still. Nyss collapsed on top of him, breathing heavily. The adrenaline drained out of him, and its absence left him with nothing but pain.

  Blood from Soldier’s arm continued to leak from the wound. Cursing, Nyss sat up, wincing at the pain in his ribs. Rising to his knees, he tore a strip of cloth from his cloak. With it, he made a makeshift tourniquet and tied it around Soldier’s arm to stop the bleeding. He’d need to find a medkit and a tube of Newskin as soon as possible.

  He stood, and the corridor spun. He blinked, stayed still until the sensation passed, then staggered into the cockpit. Seer lay on the ground, unconscious. She had a bruise on one side of her face. She must have struck an instrument panel when she fell. He considered killing her, but figured the One Sith could find some use for her.

  He checked the various lockers in the cockpit and found a medkit and a roll of deckstrip. He took the tube of Newskin from the medkit, filled Soldier’s wound with it, then covered it with gauze. With the deckstrip, he bound the hands and ankles of Soldier and Seer and heaved them against the rear wall of the cockpit.

  When he was done, he raised Syll on the comlink. “I have control of the ship, the Prime, and Jaden Korr’s ally, the spacer.”

  “Are you all right?” Syll asked. She must have heard the strain in his voice.

  “Yes,” Nyss said. “The Prime is not fully susceptible to our power. So it was … more difficult than I expected.”

  He checked the instruments, saw the coordinates that Soldier had input into the navicomp. He did not recognize the system, but then he did not know the Unknown Regions very well.

  The clones would never make it to their destination, whatever it might have been, but Wyyrlok or the Master might find it useful to know where they had gone.

  “I’m sending you some coordinates,” he said to Syll. “Record them for later.” After he’d sent them, he said, “I’ll hail Jaden Korr. Be ready.”

  Behind him, Soldier moaned. He would awaken soon.

  * * *

  Khedryn halted in mid-attack, the knife held high.

  The form in the lift was the little girl.

  She froze with fear and they stared at each other, both of them wide-eyed.

  She took a step backward into the lift. Her skin bubbled and bulged, and he knew her sickness was worsening.

  He quickly lowered the blade and tried to make himself look harmless. “No, it’s okay. I’m sorry.”

  She took another step back into the lift, skittish, and looked like she might bolt, though she had nowhere to go. He put the knife in his pocket and spoke in a calm voice.

  “I didn’t know it was you, sweetie. I thought—”

  The lift door started to close. He lunged forward, caught it with his hand, and held it open.

  At his sudden motion, she let out a little peep of fear.

  “Never mind what I thought,” he said. He knelt down to look her in the eyes and make himself look smaller. She seemed to be calming now that he’d put the kni
fe away. “I won’t hurt you. You know that, right?”

  She nodded.

  “But there’s another man on board. He might hurt you and your … friend. He’s bald, with—”

  She was already nodding.

  “Do you know where he is?” Khedryn asked.

  “Up there,” she said, pointing back at the lift. She brushed her ratty red hair out of her eyes. “He was … fighting Soldier. Soldier was bleeding.”

  Khedryn needed to get to the crew deck.

  “Is your medicine up there?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “All right. Go hide in the cargo area. Wait until someone comes for you. Either me or … someone else.”

  She eased past him and started to go.

  “Wait,” he called, and she turned. “Do you know how to launch one of the escape pods?”

  She looked at him as if he were speaking another language.

  “All right. Never mind. Just go hide. Everything will be fine. Okay? Okay? I’m going to make sure that your … people can take care of you.”

  She nodded.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Grace,” she said, and looked at the ground, shy. She behaved like any little girl anywhere in the galaxy.

  “Figures,” he said, smiling.

  He took a deep breath, turned, and boarded the lift. Inside, he hit the button that would take him to the crew deck, to the Umbaran, to the clones.

  He could not justify to himself what he was about to do, not rationally. He just felt as if he could not let Grace down.

  The doors started to close and she was still standing there, her head tilted to the side, looking at him. Her expression unnerved him. He caught the doors with his hand before they closed all the way.

  “What is it?”

  She hemmed and hawed, shifting from foot to foot.

  “What is it, Grace?”

  She looked up at him, a shy smile on her face. “Why are your eyes like that?”

  The question was so surprising under the circumstances that Khedryn was truly stunned into silence. He took his hand from the door to run his palm over his hair and the doors started to close.

  Grace stood there, waiting, as the doors formed a wall between them.

  “They got this way because they’ve looked at too many weird things.” He smiled and made a silly face.

  She giggled.

  “Now, go,” he said, and the doors closed. He chuckled all the way up to the crew deck. By the time the lift doors opened, however, his mirth was gone. An empty corridor stretched before him, a long, dim tunnel. The Umbaran had probably disabled the lights.

  Soldier’s mind clawed back to awareness. His head throbbed with each beat of his heart. Blood congealed in his beard, his hair. He groaned, blinked away the grogginess, and realized that his hands were bound behind his back. His ankles, too, were bound with deckstrip. He was seated on the floor, still in the cockpit of the supply ship. The overhead lights had been turned off. The dim glow of instrumentation provided the only illumination.

  His first thought was of Grace, her scream, and a rush of adrenaline cleared his mind. Sitting up, he glanced around, alarmed. Seer sat next to him, propped against the wall, her head tilted to the side, still unconscious. A vicious bruise, already turning purple, marred the symmetry of her features. She had smashed her face into the instrument panel when she fell, when she and Soldier had both felt the odd sensation of falling away from the Force.

  He twisted his head around and did not see Grace. She might have gotten away, or … something else might have happened to her.

  The thought of harm coming to her—the only one of the Community’s surviving children—caused a surge of anger. As his anger grew, so did his power. He pushed the power into his body, used it to augment his strength, and tested the bindings on his wrists.

  They bit like teeth into his flesh. Ignoring the pain, he tried to muscle them apart. But he could not. He could not draw fully on the Force: something was interfering with the connection.

  A sibilant voice from the front of the cockpit said, “You won’t be able to break the bindings. There’s no need to struggle. I have no intention of harming you.”

  “I can’t say the same,” Soldier said. He tried again to break them, failed. “What did you do to me? To us?”

  “You feel separate from the Force?” the Umbaran asked.

  “How did you do it?” was all Soldier asked.

  The Umbaran chuckled. “By pushing a bit of my world out into yours.”

  Soldier did not understand. He imagined he never would. He could see the Umbaran only in silhouette, standing with his back to Soldier and Seer as he studied something on the ship’s instrumentation.

  “Who are you?” Soldier asked. “What do you want?”

  “I want you,” the Umbaran said. “You’re of interest to the Master.”

  You’re of interest. Soldier had often heard phrases like that from the doctors in the cloning facility. It always heralded something unpleasant.

  “Why?” he asked. “I’m no one.”

  “That’s not true at all,” said the Umbaran.

  “Then take me. Let Seer and Grace go.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that. Quiet now,” the Umbaran said. “I’ve got a call to make.”

  Junker emerged from hyperspace in the outer reaches of the system. The light of a distant red dwarf cast the cockpit in crimson. Marr set to work on the scanners.

  “System has two gas giants and a thick asteroid belt. Nothing else.”

  “Where’s the supply ship?”

  “Searching,” Marr said, keying in a broad sensor sweep. “I have it. It’s on the other side of the asteroid belt. Our silhouette is so small that I doubt they’ve detected us this far out.”

  “Agreed,” Jaden said. He engaged the ion engines and streaked toward the asteroid belt. In an effort to avoid detection, he kept Junker on the same plane as the bulk of the asteroids, trying to use them as cover. His mind raced along with Junker. He needed to come up with a way to board the supply ship.

  Before they reached the asteroid belt, the ship-to-ship communicator pinged. Jaden and Marr both stared at it in surprise.

  “That’s an open hail,” said Jaden.

  “From the supply ship,” Marr said, and they shared a glance.

  “Maybe Khedryn has gotten free and is trying to raise us,” Jaden said. He opened the channel.

  A soft, sibilant voice carried over the comm and destroyed whatever hope he’d had for Khedryn’s escape.

  “I know that you can hear this, Jaden Korr. Listen carefully to what I am about to say. My name is Nyss and I have taken control of the medical supply ship out of Fhost. The clones you were after are dead or captured. Khedryn Faal is now in my custody.”

  “The clones are dead?” Marr asked, incredulous.

  Jaden stared at the comm, trying to make sense of the sudden turn of events. He pushed the transmit button. “You are to turn Khedryn Faal over to us immediately.”

  Nyss’s voice answered, his soft tone turned hard. “You give exactly no orders here, Jedi. Do you understand? You will do exactly what I say and only what I say.”

  Jaden’s fist clenched in frustration. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “I will explain that in person, Jedi.”

  The request puzzled Jaden. “You want to meet?”

  “I want to trade. Khedryn Faal for you. Otherwise, I’ll kill him.”

  Jaden cut off the transmission and looked over at Marr. Lines furrowed the Cerean’s brow.

  “Thoughts?” Jaden asked.

  “He is probably lying. How could he have gotten aboard? How could he have killed all the clones? He could be one of the clones. All of this could be a ploy to get at you.”

  “A lot of unknowns,” Jaden said, nodding.

  “Too many,” Marr said.

  Nyss’s voice carried over the comm “You have sixty seconds. After that, I will kill Khedry
n Faal.”

  Jaden slammed a fist on the transmit button. “Harm him and I’ll hunt you across the galaxy.”

  “Fifty-eight seconds.”

  Frustration almost pulled a curse from Jaden. It did pull a curse from Marr.

  “What do we do, Master?” the Cerean asked.

  Jaden could feel his worry for Khedryn. He made up his mind.

  “We trade. He wants me for some reason. He can have me. But I plan to be more than he can handle. The important thing is to get Khedryn to safety. Agreed?”

  Ambivalence twisted Marr’s face into a landscape of worry.

  “Forty seconds,” Nyss said.

  “Agreed,” Marr said reluctantly. “I don’t see any other option.”

  Khedryn slid out of the lift, his fingers white around the hilt of the knife. Voices from ahead sent his heart spinning and froze him to the floor. He heard the sibilant whisper of the Umbaran and …

  Jaden’s voice?

  Or was it Soldier’s?

  He crept forward, hunched, hugging the wall, trying to merge with the darkness. He winced at the soft sound of his shoes on the deck. The corridor offered almost no cover at all, so he tried to move rapidly, hoping speed would do where stealth was not possible. The last thing he wanted was the Umbaran and his crossbow to catch him at a distance, without cover. Khedryn had never missed a blaster more in his life.

  The cockpit doors were open, the cockpit dark beyond, lit only by the dull glow of instrumentation. Staying close to the wall, Khedryn moved closer.

  The voices fell silent. Fearing he’d been heard, Khedryn froze. His breathing sounded like a bellows in his ears. He expected the Umbaran to appear in the cockpit doorway at any moment, crossbow cocked.

  More voices from inside the cockpit. Khedryn heard no alarm in them and assumed he had not been heard.

  Hoping the conversation would mask the sound of his final approach, he hurried to the doorway, crouching low, and peeked his head around the doorjamb.

  The Umbaran sat in the pilot’s seat facing away from Khedryn. The comm chirped with an incoming message, and Jaden’s voice carried over the speaker.

  Jaden hit the transmit button to speak to Nyss. “Done. A trade, then. Me for Khedryn.”