by Paul S. Kemp
* * *
Jaden, Marr, and Khedryn studied the minimal data available on the system to which the clones had jumped.
“Maybe they had a misjump?” Khedryn said, scratching his head. He finished the last of the caf in his mug.
R-6, standing behind the trio, hummed as he offered Khedryn the pot of caf the droid carried. Khedryn held out his mug and R-6 filled it. Khedryn thanked him and the droid whistled with pleasure.
“Possible,” Marr said. “That system is bathed in radiation. Why would they want to go there?”
“Junker’s deflectors will keep us clean of the rads,” Khedryn said. “Their deflectors could do the same.”
“Agreed,” Marr said with a tilt of his head. “But there can’t be anything in that system but rocks.”
“Two planets,” Jaden said, looking over the math and long-range observational data. “An asteroid belt, maybe.”
“In a sterile system,” Khedryn said. “Like I said, a misjump. Or a waystop. Could be they had a mechanical issue and needed to get out of hyperspace for a repair.”
“I don’t think so,” Jaden said, running his hand over his goatee. “There has to be something there.”
“One sure way to find out,” Khedryn said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Who’s got the chewstim? I’m out and we don’t jump until I have some.”
Marr felt around in his pockets, came up empty. Jaden had none. Khedryn’s face fell.
R-6 beeped excitedly and extended a thin appendage from the cylinder of his body. In it, the droid held a piece of chewstim. Khedryn smiled, unwrapped it, and popped it in his mouth.
“Now we’re ready. Well done, droid.”
In moments, Marr had the jump coordinates and course in the navicomp.
Khedryn activated the hyperdrive and they leapt into the blue.
The immensity of the station, the disquieting lines of its form, humbled Soldier. He had doubted Seer, had thought they were on a course to nowhere, but in the end Seer had been right. Again.
He felt her looking at him, measuring his response, judging him.
“Do you believe now, Soldier?” she asked.
He hesitated, then nodded.
The huge station, built of some smooth, greenish substance that did not appear to be metal, floated above the planet in geosynchronous orbit. A shaft of some kind descended from one end of the ovoid station all the way down to the surface of the planet.
“Move the ship close to the station,” Seer said. She had risen halfway out of her seat, as if buoyed up by her belief.
Soldier flew the supply ship in closer. Even the large ship seemed tiny compared with the station’s bulk. Its green surface featured the irregular bumps and curves of something organic rather than made. As he watched, a portion of the station’s hull lurched out.
Soldier exclaimed in alarm and started to pull up on the stick and engage the engines. Seer’s calm voice stopped him.
“It’s all right, Soldier.”
He stared at her, at the station, and took his hands from the stick.
The bulge in the station expanded into a tube, a docking terminal that reached for one of the docking rings on the supply ship. As ship and station connected, more appendages extended outward from the station to grasp the underside of the ship and hold it in place.
Soldier stared at it all in wide-eyed wonder.
“You can power down,” Seer said, her voice distant. “We’re going aboard.”
Soldier powered down the supply ship and he and Grace followed Seer to the airlock. When it opened, a loamy, organic smell filled the air. Seer breathed deeply.
Grace plugged her nose. “Stinky. What is this place?”
Seer seemed to be listening not only to Grace but to some other voice only she could hear. “This place is home.”
Her skin roiled, rippled, but she seemed not to notice.
They walked into the docking tube. It felt warm beneath their feet, spongy, inviting. It opened onto a large, arched corridor that extended left and right. Forms lay all along the corridor, skeletons of beings that had died there long before. Hundreds of them.
“Those are bodies,” Soldier said.
Seer seemed not to care. She walked into the corridor and turned right, as if she knew exactly where she was going. Soldier pulled Grace close to him.
“Don’t look,” he said to her, as they picked their way through the skeletal remains.
Rotted clothes, mere tatters of fabric, clung to the mummified bodies. Soldier noted the remains of humans and nonhuman sentients, their skin pulled taught against bones to show teeth and tendons and muscle. He could not tell how they died.
“Where is Mother?” Soldier asked. He spoke in a low tone, as if afraid of waking someone. The station appeared to be abandoned, a vast emptiness, a tomb for the mummified dead.
Seer held out her arms and turned a circle, dancing among the dead. “She’s all around us, Soldier. But she wants us to see her face. Come. Come.”
She hurried down the large corridor. Soldier and Grace struggled to keep up.
“We must go down,” Seer said. “To the planet. There we’ll commune with Mother in person.”
Soldier thought of the shaft that connected the orbital station to the planet. The idea of descending it alarmed him.
“How will we get down there?” he asked. “Maybe we should go back to the ship and take it down.”
Seer shook her head, the smile she’d been wearing since walking into the station seemingly plastered to her face. “Mother will show us the way.”
Soldier did not argue the point. He was finished arguing with Seer. She had, after all, brought them to Mother.
He put a comforting hand on Grace and followed Seer.
Nyss stood before the Iteration’s stasis chamber. The small window in the upright chamber’s lid afforded him a view of the Iteration’s face, Soldier’s face, Jaden Korr’s face even down to the goatee. He hated that face, the face that had taken his sister from him.
But he would need the Iteration if he was to succeed in the task Wyyrlok had set for him.
He punched the open sequence into the stasis chamber’s control panel. He had replaced his lost weapon, and the cool hilt of a vibroblade filled each of his fists. The Iteration had been forced into stasis. He could awaken … displeased.
Nyss let the hole of his suppressive field stretch out to engulf the Iteration. He thought the field more powerful since the loss of Syll. The hole of his existence had grown darker, the depth of his solitude deeper. He seemed to live in his own pocket, isolated from everything and everyone else.
Strange, he thought, that his sister had been a limit to his power over the years. He had long considered her an amplifier.
Still, he wondered if his newfound power would allow the field to function fully against the Iteration. It had worked only partially on Soldier. Would it function against Jaden Korr?
The chamber hissed as it vented frozen gas and slowly raised the body temperature of the Iteration. Nyss watched the bio-readouts as the Iteration climbed his way back to consciousness. His brain waves spiked and his gray eyes opened, fixed on Nyss.
Nyss hit the speaker button. “Can you hear me?”
The Iteration nodded. “Something is wrong, I cannot …”
“… feel the Force?”
“Yes.”
“That is my doing,” Nyss said, pleased. He pulled the field back to himself so that it no longer affected the Iteration.
“Do you remember who you are?” he asked.
“I’m an iteration of Jaden Korr.”
“You’re the Iteration, at least for now. And I need your assistance.”
The stasis chamber door clicked and slowly opened. The Iteration began detaching himself from the tubes that connected him to the chamber’s life-support system.
“Assistance with what?”
“With murder,” Nyss answered.
One dead, one taken—that was Nyss’s mission.
>
“Whose?” the Iteration asked.
Nyss ignored the question. “We need to move quickly.”
He spoke the coded phrase that turned the Iteration into an automaton.
The clone’s eyes went blank and staring, his body slack. He started to fall, but Nyss caught him before his face slammed into the deck, then spoke the phrase that brought the Iteration back to full consciousness.
“What happened?” the Iteration asked, pulling free of Nyss.
A test, Nyss almost said, but instead he replied, “Probably just an aftereffect of the stasis. You’ll be fine. Follow me.”
In the cockpit, the Iteration eyed Syll’s body, looked at Nyss with a question on his face, but said nothing.
“My sister,” Nyss said. “Stay here.”
He lifted Syll from the seat. She was cold and limp in his arms.
“I can help,” the Iteration said.
“No! Never touch her! Never!”
Glaring at the Iteration, he left the cockpit and carried Syll back through the ship to the stasis chamber. He placed her within the chamber, closed and sealed the door, and set the temperature within to a bit above freezing.
She’d stay with him just as she was—present but not present, there but not there, dead but preserved.
Hadn’t he always wondered if they were really dead?
Now he knew.
When he returned to the cockpit, he found the Iteration in the copilot’s seat, checking coordinates in the navicomp.
“Is that where we’re going?” the Iteration asked, indicating the coordinates Nyss had pulled from the clone’s navicomp.
“Yes,” said Nyss. “And we’re going right now.”
Marr fine-tuned Junker’s deflector as the ship came out of hyperspace. The distant pulsar and its corona bathed the cockpit in color. From their distance and angle of observation, the system’s asteroid belt looked as if a huge hand had sketched a line across the system, dividing top from bottom.
“Deflectors are blocking the radiation,” Khedryn said, eyeing the scanner. “Nice work, Marr.”
Two planets floated through the space of the system, separated in their orbits by millions of miles.
Jaden felt a faint ache in the back of his skull, a ping against his Force sensitivity.
“What is that?” he said slowly, staring out at the system.
“What is what?” Khedryn asked. He followed Jaden’s gaze out the canopy. “I don’t see anything, but then I’m the one with the funny eyes. What is it?”
Marr leaned back in his chair. “I feel it, too.”
“The dark side,” Jaden said.
“The clones?” Marr asked.
Jaden shook his head. “Something else.”
Khedryn rolled his eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Some other mysterious dark-side thing?”
“Where is it coming from?” Marr asked. He was already running a more comprehensive scan of the system.
“I don’t see the clone’s ship on the scanner,” Marr said. “Both of the system’s planets are in tidal lock, so there’s an area of each I can’t scan from here. We’ll need to move in closer.”
“Why would they put down on one of those planets?” Khedryn asked. “They’re rocks.”
Marr shook his head. “Could just be in geosynchronous orbit in a blind spot. We need to get closer to see.”
Khedryn fired the ion engines and Junker started devouring the distance in ten-thousand-kilometer bites.
“Odd,” Marr said. “That asteroid belt …”
Jaden went over to the Cerean’s station, reviewed the data over his shoulder.
“What’s that metal?” he asked.
“Scan can’t identify the metal,” Marr said to Jaden. “But there’s a lot of it. It’s … hmm.”
“What?”
Marr refined the scan further, focused not on the asteroid belt but on a few of the metallic asteroids in particular. He looked up from his scanner, the wheels of his mind visibly turning behind his brown eyes. “Some of it shows structure.”
“Structure?”
“Did the supply ship hit an asteroid and blow?” Khedryn asked. Jaden could hear the concern in his voice, concern for the clone child.
“No,” Marr said. He stared out into the gulf. “But those asteroids aren’t naturally occurring rock. They are a destroyed structure of some kind.”
“That’s impossible,” Jaden said, but he could not dispute the readings on the scans. “It would have been massive. No one has that kind of technology.”
“Not anymore,” Marr said.
Jaden took Marr’s point at once. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“I’m only offering a possibility.”
“It’s that old?”
Marr raised his eyebrows, shrugged. “I can’t say for sure, but it’s old. It could be that old.”
Khedryn leaned back in his seat. “Someone want to fill me in? What are we talking about here?”
Jaden leaned back in his chair. “Marr is suggesting that the asteroids, the destroyed structure, could be Celestial in origin.”
“Or Rakatan,” Marr said. “Or another civilization from that time of which we have no record.”
Jaden knew little about the Celestials—no one did—and only a little more about the Rakatans. Vague references from his history classes as an apprentice in the Academy bubbled up from the depths of his memory.
The Celestials had been an ancient race of unknown appearance but possessed of incredible knowledge. Their technology was said to be able to move entire star systems.
The Rakatans and their so-called Infinite Empire had arisen after the Celestials vanished from the cosmic stage. They used technology powered by the dark side of the Force, technology almost on a par with that of the Celestials, to conquer sector after sector. Their war with the Gree and the Kwa had torn the galaxy apart. Some aftereffect of their technology could have accounted for Jaden’s faint perception of the dark side in the system.
But like the Celestials, the Rakatans had faded from the galaxy millennia ago, their entire civilization the victim of some catastrophe or war. Today, the few scant ruins of their civilization still scattered about the galaxy provided tantalizing fodder for archaeologists and historians, but nothing more.
“You think this is plausible?” Khedryn said, to no one in particular. He popped a bubble with his chewstim. “I thought half of that stuff was a myth. I mean, the Rakatans?”
“It’s not a myth,” Jaden said. “At least not all of it.”
Khedryn looked from Jaden, to Marr, to Jaden. “Next thing you’ll be telling me they turned the star into a pulsar during one of their wars to destroy whatever that asteroid belt had been.”
Jaden said nothing, his mind turning.
“You aren’t saying that!” Khedryn said. “Come on! I need some caf. Droid!”
Marr said, “From what little we know, that would almost certainly have been within their power.”
Khedryn turned back to the stick, shaking his head. “This is crazy. Completely crazy.”
R-6 filled Khedryn’s mug and Jaden put a hand on R-6’s dome. “Ar-Six, bundle what little we know into a packet and send it via subspace back to the Grand Master. I don’t want this information to go unreported.”
R-6 beeped agreement and plugged into one of Junker’s network sockets.
“That ought to make for good reading,” Khedryn said, as Junker approached the nearest of the system’s two planets. “Coming around to the dark side of the planet.”
Junker chased the horizon line of the barren, blasted surface of the rocky planet. As they came around to the far side, Jaden and Marr leaned forward in their seats, R-6 beeped a question, and Khedryn gave their thoughts voice.
“What is that?”
Mother felt Seer and two others when they approached in their vessel. Instinct she could not control caused her cage to cradle their ship, to connect her body to it. She shivered with delight
when she felt the tread of their feet upon her cage.
I am here, Seer, she projected, and reveled in the connection to Seer that close proximity allowed. I wish to look upon you and for you to look upon me.
She felt Seer’s glee at her mental touch, an offering of happiness that Mother gladly received. She projected directions into Seer’s limited consciousness.
This is the path, she sent, and Seer heard and heeded.
Mother tracked their progress as they approached. She could scarcely contain her excitement. She would be embodied, at last reified in something other than the prison of the station.
But then Mother felt a disturbance in nearby space, emotions contrary to her will. She removed her attention from Seer and her companions and reached out into the void around the prison.
There, she felt the presence of other minds, hostile of intent, and they were coming.
She could not stop them, not yet, but she could delay them.
She reached out with her power to the ancient remains that lingered with her in the station, filled them with sparks of her power. She’d burned most of them out long before, but what little remained could serve her purpose for a time.
She felt them as they rose, felt the shambling tread of their feet on her cage.
Hurry, Seer, she projected. Hurry.
A CYLINDER AS LARGE AS A STAR CRUISER HUNG IN GEOSYNCHRONOUS orbit over the rocky face of the dark side of the planet. The cylinder tapered to a point at one end, fattened to a rounded end on the other. In form, it reminded Jaden of a kind of shell. Its surface, the deep greenish black of ocean depths, was smooth, without any visible viewports or docking stations.
The narrow end of the cylinder faced away from the planet, toward the system’s star, while the wide end faced the planet’s surface. A thick tether of the same green material extended from the wide end, reached all the way to the planet’s surface, and vanished in a dimple of the rocky crust.
“Looks like the damned planet has a tail,” Khedryn said, and Jaden agreed.
The entire structure emitted dark-side power, a breeze of evil wafting into space, polluting the entire system. This power felt different, though, a flavor of the dark side that Jaden had never before encountered.