by Troy Denning
“Extra discipline with the Massassi,” Saes said to Dor. The Lignan would agitate them. He wanted to head off outbreaks of violence. Or at least he wanted the violence appropriately directed.
“I will inform the security teams,” Dor said. “Do you … feel that, Captain?”
Saes nodded, drunk on the dark side. The air in the ship was alive with its potential. His skin felt warm, his head light.
With an effort of will, he regained his focus. He had little time before he would rendezvous with Naga Sadow and the rest of the Sith force moving against Kirrek. He opened a comm channel with Omen.
“An hour more, Korsin,” he said.
“Agreed,” Korsin answered, and Saes felt the human’s glee through the connection. “Do you feel the power around us, Saes? Kirrek will burn.”
Saes stared at the incinerated moon in his viewscreen, spinning dark and dead through the void of space.
“It will,” he said, and cut off the connection.
Relin stared out of the large, transparisteel bubble window that fronted the cockpit of his starfighter. Beside him, his Padawan, Drev, tapped hyperspace formulae into the navigation computer. Drev’s body challenged the seat with its girth. His flight suit pinched adipose tissue at neck and wrist, giving his head and hands the look of tied-off sausages. Still, Drev was almost thin by the standards of Askajians. And Relin had never before met an Askajian in whom the Force was so strong.
Their Infiltrator hung in the orange-and-red cloud of the Remmon Nebula. The small ship—with its minimal, deliberately erratic emission signature, sleek profile, and sensor baffles—would be invisible to scans outside the swirl.
Lines of yellow and orange light veined the superheated gas around them, like terrestrial lightning frozen in time. Relin watched the cloud slowly churn in the magnetic winds. He had been across half the galaxy since joining the Jedi, and the beauty it hid in its darkest corners amazed him still. He saw in that beauty the Force made manifest, a physical representation of the otherwise invisible power that served as the scaffolding of the universe.
But the scaffolding was under threat. Sadow and the Sith would corrupt it. Relin had seen the consequence of that corruption firsthand, when he had lost Saes to the dark side.
He pushed the memory from his mind, the pain still too acute.
The conflict between Jedi and Sith had reached a turning point. Kirrek would be a fulcrum, tilting the war toward one side or the other. Relin knew the Jedi under Memit Nadill and Odan-Urr had fortified the planet well, but he knew, too, that Sadow’s fleets would come in overwhelming force. He suspected they would also strike Coruscant, and had so notified Nadill.
Still typing in coordinates, Drev asked, “We will be able to pick up the beacon’s pulse once we enter hyperspace?”
“Yes,” Relin said.
At least that was the theory. If they were right about the hyperspace lane Harbinger and Omen had taken; if Saes had not diverted his ship to another hyperspace lane; and if Harbinger and Omen remained near enough the hyperspace lane for the beacon’s signal to reach them.
“And if the agents did not place the hyperspace beacon? Or if Saes located it and disabled it?”
Relin stared out at the nebula. “Peace, Drev. There are many ifs. Things are what they are.”
Matters had moved so rapidly of late that Relin had not had time to report back to his superiors as regularly as he should, just the occasional missive sent in a sub-space burst as time and conditions allowed.
He had picked up Saes’s trail near Primus Goluud. There, he’d seen the armada of Sith forces marshaling for an assault; he’d seen Saes’s ship leave the armada with a sister ship, Omen, falling in behind.
After sending a short, subspace report back to the Order on Coruscant and Kirrek, Relin had received orders to follow Saes and try to determine the Sith’s purpose. He had learned little as Harbinger and Omen moved rapidly from one backrocket system to another, dispatching recon droids, scanning, then moving on.
“He is searching for something,” Relin said, more to himself than Drev.
Drev chuckled, and his double chin shook. “Saes? His conscience, no doubt. He seems to have misplaced it somewhere.”
Relin did not smile. The loss of Saes cut too sharply for jest.
“I worry over your casual attitude toward matters of import. Many will die in this war.”
Drev bowed his head, his shoulders drooping, trying to look contrite under his mass of thick brown hair. “Forgive me, Master. But I …” He paused, though his round face showed him struggling with a thought.
“What is it?” Relin asked.
Drev did not look at him as he said, “I sometimes think you laugh too little. Among my people, the shamans of the Moon Lady teach that tragedy is the best time for mirth. Laugh even when you die, they say. There is joy to be found in almost everything.”
“And there is also pain,” Relin said, thinking of Saes. “Are the coordinates ready?”
Drev stiffened in his chair and in his tone. “Ready, Master.”
“Then let us find out what it is that Saes is looking for.”
Relin maneuvered the Infiltrator out of the nebula and checked it against Drev’s coordinates. Stars dotted the viewscreen.
“We go,” Relin said.
Drev touched a button on his console, and the transparisteel cockpit window dimmed to spare them the hypnotic blue swirl of a hyperspace tunnel. Relin engaged the hyperdrive. Points of light turned to infinite lines.
THE PRESENT:
41.5 YEARS AFTER THE BATTLE OF YAVIN
Darkness plagued Jaden, the lightless ink of a singularity. He was falling, falling forever. His stomach crawled up his throat, crowding out whatever scream he might have uttered.
He still felt the Force around him, within him, but only thickly, only attenuated, as if his sensitivity were numbed.
He hit unseen ground with a grunt and fell to all fours. Snow crunched under his palms and boots. Gusts of freezing wind rifled his robes to stab at his skin. Ice borne by the wind peppered his face and rimed his beard. He still could see nothing in the pitch. He stood, shaky, shaking, freezing.
“Where is this place?” he called. The darkness was so deep he could not see his frozen breath. His voice sounded small in the void. “Arsix?”
No response.
“Arsix?”
Odd, he thought, that the first thing he called for in an uncertain situation was his droid rather than a fellow Jedi.
He reached for the familiar heft of his primary lightsaber, found its belt clip empty. He reached around to the small of his back for his secondary lightsaber—the crude but effective weapon he had built as a boy on Coruscant without any training in the Force—and found it gone, too. His blaster was not in his thigh holster. No glow rod in his utility pocket.
He was cold, alone, unequipped, blind in the darkness.
What had happened? He remembered nothing.
Drawing his robes tightly about him to ward off the cold, he focused his hearing, but heard nothing over the wind except the gong of his heartbeat in his ears. With difficulty, he reached out with his Force sense through the fog of his benighted sensitivity, trying to feel the world around him indirectly. Through the dull operation of his expanded consciousness he sensed something …
There were others there with him, out in the darkness.
Several others.
He sharpened his concentration and the tang of the dark side teased his perception—Sith.
But not quite Sith, not entirely: the dark side adulterated.
He tried to ignore the familiar caress of the dark side’s touch. He knew the line between light and dark was as narrow as a vibroblade-edge. His Master, Kyle Katarn, had taught him as much. Every Jedi walked that edge. Some understood the precipice under their feet, and some did not. And it was the latter who so often fell. But it was the former who so often suffered. Jaden frequently wished he had remained in ignorance, had stayed the boy on C
oruscant for whom the Force had been magic.
Summoned from the past, his Master’s words bounced around his brain: The Force is a tool, Jaden. Sometimes a weapon, sometimes a salve. Dark side, light side, these are distinctions of insignificant difference. Do not fall into the trap of classification. Sentience curses us with a desire to categorize and draw lines, to fear that after this be dragons. But that is illusion. After this is not dragons but more knowledge, deeper understanding. Be at peace with that.
But Jaden never had been at peace with that. He feared he never would. Worse, he feared he never should. After completing his training, Jaden had done some research into unorthodox theories about the Force. He had come to think—and fear—that his Master had been right.
“Show yourselves,” he called into the darkness, and the howling wind devoured his words. He knew the Sith would have sensed his presence, the same as he had sensed theirs.
They were all around him, closing fast. He felt vulnerable, with nothing at his back, unable to see. He sank into the Force and denied his fear.
Finding his calm, he stood in a half crouch, eyes closed, mind focused, his entire body a coiled spring. Even without his lightsaber, a dark side user would find him a formidable foe.
“Jaden,” whispered a voice in his ear, a voice he’d heard before only on vidscreen surveillance.
He spun, whirled, the power of the Force gathered in his hands for a telekinetic blast, and saw … only darkness.
Lumiya.
It had been Lumiya’s voice. Hadn’t it? But Lumiya was long dead.
A hand clutched at his robe.
“Jaden,” said another voice. Lassin’s voice.
He used the Force to augment a backward leap, flipping in midair, and landed on his feet three meters behind Lassin, a fellow Jedi Knight who should have been dead, who had died soon after the Ragnos crisis. Lassin’s voice unmoored him from his calm, and Force lightning, blue and baleful, came unbidden and crackled on his fingertips …
He saw nothing.
The hairs on Jaden’s neck rose. He stared at his hand, the blue discharge of his fingertips. With an effort of will, he quelled it.
“Jaden Korr,” said a voice to his left, Master Kam Solusar’s voice, but Jaden felt not the comforting presence of another light-side user, only the ominous energy of the dark side.
He spun, but saw only darkness.
“What you seek can be found in the black hole on Fhost, Jaden,” said Mara Jade Skywalker, and still Jaden saw nothing, no one.
Mara Jade Skywalker was dead.
“Who are you?” he called, and the wind answered with ice and screams. “Where am I?”
He reached out again with his Force sense, trying to locate Lumiya, Lassin, Solusar, and Skywalker, but found them gone.
Again, he was alone in the darkness. He was always alone in darkness.
It registered with him then. He was dreaming. The Force was speaking to him. He should have realized it sooner.
The revelation stilled the world. The wind fell silent and the air cleared of ice.
Jaden stood ready, tense.
A distant, sourceless cry sounded, repeated itself, the rhythm regular, the tone mechanical. It could have been coming from the other side of the planet.
“Help us. Help us. Help us. Help us …”
He turned a circle, fists clenched. “Where are you?”
The darkness around him diminished. Pinpoints of light formed in the black vault over him. Stars. He scanned the sky, searching for something familiar. There. He recognized only enough to place the sky somewhere in a Rimward sector of the Unknown Regions. The dim blue glow of a distant gas giant burned in the black of the sky, its light peeking diffidently through the swirl. Thick rings composed of particles of ice and rock belted the gas giant.
He was on one of the gas giant’s moons.
His eyes adjusted more fully to the dimness and he saw that he stood on a desolate, wind-racked plain of ice that extended as far as he could see. Snowdrifts as tall as buildings gave the terrain the appearance of a storm-racked ocean frozen in time. Cracks veined the exposed ice, the circulatory system of a stalled world. Chasms dotted the surface here and there like hungry mouths. Glaciers groaned in the distance, the rumbles of an angry world. He saw no sign of Lumiya or Lassin or any of the other Sith imposters he had sensed. He saw no sign of life anywhere.
His breath formed clouds before his face. His left fist clenched and unclenched reflexively over the void in his palm where his lightsaber should have been.
Without warning, the sky exploded above him with a thunderous boom. A cloud of fire tore through the atmosphere, smearing the sky in smoke and flame. A shriek like stressed metal rolled over Jaden. Ice cracked and groaned on the surface.
Jaden squinted up at the sky, still lit with the afterglow of the destruction, and watched a rain of glowing particulates fall, showering the moon in a hypnotic pattern of falling sparks.
His Force sense perceived them for what they were—the dark side reified. He disengaged his perception too slowly, and the impact of so much evil hit him like a punch in the face. He vomited down the front of his robes, fell to the frozen ground, and balled up on the frozen surface of the moon as the full weight of the dark side coated him in its essence.
There was nowhere to hide, no shelter; it fell all around him, on him, saturated him …
He woke, sweating and light-headed, to the sound of speeder and swoop traffic outside his Coruscant apartment. The thump of his heartbeat rattled the bars of his rib cage. In his mind’s eye, he still saw the shower of falling sparks, the rain of evil. He cleared his throat, and the sensors in the room, detecting his wakefulness, turned on dim room lights.
“Arsix?” he said.
No response. He sat up, alarmed.
“Arsix?”
The sound of shouts and screams outside his window caused him to leap from his bed. With a minor exercise of will, he pulled his primary lightsaber to his hand from the side table near his bed and activated it. The green blade pierced the dimness of his room.
The black ball of Korriban filled Kell’s viewscreen. Clouds seethed in its atmosphere, an angry churn.
He settled Predator, a CloakShape fighter modified with a hyperspace sled and sensor-evading technology copied from a stolen StealthX, into low orbit. The roiling cloak of dark energy that shrouded the planet buffeted Predator, and the ship’s metal creaked in the strain. Kell attuned his vision to Fate and saw the hundreds of daen nosi—fate lines, a Coruscanti academic had once translated the Anzati term—that intersected at Korriban, the planet like a bulbous black spider in a web of glowing potentialities. The past, present, and future lines of the galaxy’s fate passed through the Sith tomb-world’s inhabitants, threads of glowing green, orange, red, and blue that cut it into pieces.
Space-time was pregnant with the possible, and the richness of the soup swelled Kell’s hunger. He had first seen the daen nosi in childhood, after his first kill, and had followed them since. He thought himself unique among the Anzati, special, called, but he could not be certain.
Thinking of his first kill turned his mind to the food he kept in the cargo hold of Predator, but he quelled his body’s impulse with a thought.
His own daen nosi stretched out before him, the veins of his own fate a network of silver lines reaching down through the transparisteel of the cockpit and into the dark swirl, down to the tombs of the Sith, to the secret places where the One Sith lurked. He had business with them, and they with him. The lines of their fates were intertwined.
He punched the coded coordinates of his destination into the navicomp and engaged the autopilot. As Predator began its descent through the black atmosphere, he left the cockpit and went below decks to the cargo hold. He had half a standard hour before he would reach his destination, so he freed his body to feel hunger. Growing anticipation sharpened his appetite.
Five stasis freezers stood against one wall of the hold like coffins. Kell had
given them their own clear space in the hold, separated from the equipment and vehicles that otherwise cluttered the compartment. A humanoid slept in stasis in each freezer, three humans and two Rodians. He examined the freezers’ readouts, checking vital signs. All remained in good health.
Staring at their still features, Kell wondered what happened behind their closed eyes, in the quiet of their dreams. He imagined the zest of their soup and hunger squirmed in his gut. None were so-called Force-sensitives, who had the richest soup, but they would suffice.
He glided from one freezer to the next, brushing his fingertips on the cool glass that separated him from his prey. His captives’ daen nosi extended from their freezers to him, his to them. He stopped before the middle-aged human male he had taken on Corellia.
“You,” he said, and watched his silver lines intertwine with the green lines of the Corellian.
He activated the freezer’s thaw cycle. The hiss of escaping gas screamed the human’s end. Kell watched as the freezer’s readout indicated a rising temperature, watched as color returned to the human’s flesh. His hunger grew, and the feeders nesting in the sacs of his cheeks twitched. He needed his prey conscious, otherwise he could not transcend.
He reached through the daen nosi that connected him to his meal.
Awaken, he softly projected.
The human’s eyes snapped open, pupils dilated, lids wide. Fear traveled through the mental connection and Kell savored it. The freezer’s readout showed a spiking heart rate, increasing respiration. The human opened his mouth to speak but his motor functions, still sluggish from stasis, could produce only a muffled, groggy croak.
Kell pressed the release button, and the freezer’s cover slid open. Be calm, he projected, and his command wormed its way into the human’s mind, a prophylactic for the fear.
But growing terror overpowered Kell’s casual psychic hold. The human struggled against his mental bonds, finally found his voice.