The Old Republic Series

by Sean Williams

  There’s only one right choice.

  He picked up the sliver of metal. It was cool and sharp-edged to the touch. If he put it in his right fist and squeezed, it would surely draw blood.

  He engulfed it in his fist and squeezed.

  The bottom dropped out of the hold and he was suddenly falling.

  His first thought was to grab hold of something and hang on, both mentally and physically. This was utterly unlike any psychometric information he had ever received before. But what he was reading this time was unlike anything he’d tried touching before, so fighting the vision could be self-defeating. Perhaps being plunged in the deep end was exactly what he needed. He braced himself against the rush of vertigo and tried to take from the experience what he could.

  Falling. At first there seemed to be nothing more to it than that. Then he noticed details highly reminiscent of the strange blue geometry of hyperspace. Was that what he was glimpsing? The nest’s last journey, or its first?

  There was a blinding flash of light, and he stopped with a jerk. All was dark again. Voices came and went, too indistinct to make out words. They were raised, though, as if in an argument. He could make out no faces, no locations, no coordinates. Just a feeling: that the thing the sliver had belonged to was determined to survive.

  The Cinzia, he thought. He was spooling back through the droid factory’s history, in reverse. It clearly possessed a rudimentary self-awareness, which shouldn’t have come as a surprise since it had single-handedly organized the surreptitious creation of four advanced combat droids without being detected. Even if most of its internal algorithms were automated, it had taken a certain degree of cunning to know when to lay low and when to become active.

  The flash was probably the explosion that had almost killed it.

  Shigar wanted to get moving again. The next jump would be the one that would take him home, to where the droid factory had originated. But his eagerness only caused the vision to fray about the edges—and suddenly he was dumped back onto the hard floor of the hold with nothing to show for the experience.

  He sat, breathing heavily and cursing his impatience.

  When he opened his right hand, the sliver rested on his palm in a growing pool of blood.

  What had he done this time, compared with all the other times before, that had worked?

  He could guess the answer, and it was dismayingly simple. He hadn’t done anything special. He’d just done it. The Force had moved through him in exactly the right way, and the knowledge he’d been looking for had come to him. It hadn’t taken any particular degree of concentration, or any fancy mental footwork. He had done it because he could do it. There was a fair chance he hadn’t always been able to do it; he was sure that all those years of training hadn’t been for nothing. But at some point, as Larin had said, all the extra thinking he did on the subject had been wasted. It had, in fact, been counterproductive.

  The next question was: could he do it again?

  He didn’t need to ask. He didn’t want to ask it. The time for questions was over.

  He transferred the sliver to his left hand and squeezed again.

  A second vision of hyperspace enfolded him. Falling faster this time. The blue tunnel was twisted, warped. He felt dizzy. Mysterious forces tugged at him, shook him violently at times. He felt like he was running down a steep mountain and that at any moment he might trip and tumble headlong all the way to the bottom. As the droid factory’s journey unspooled backward in time, it took him into a deep, dark place.

  Shigar didn’t question the vision. He let it unfold at its own pace. The shuddering grew worse as he neared the Cinzia’s origin, until he felt that he might be torn apart.

  When it ceased, all was quiet. He felt a sense of homecoming, even though that was surely illusory. The factory was a machine, and it had been leaving its homeworld, not arriving there. But the feeling was persuasive. He felt that he belonged here, and that here—wherever here was—was important and precious. Unique. Shigar understood that feeling, even though he’d never felt it for Kiffu, his birthplace. Shigar had been a citizen of the galaxy for too long to feel close ties anywhere.

  Again he thought of Larin and her changed circumstances. She, too, had taken great strides across the Republic and beyond. But now she was stuck on Coruscant—or had been until his arrival. She had never expressed any unhappiness about her relative confinement, but he could only imagine how it must feel.

  The droid factory felt as though it belonged. Wherever it came from, that was where it had wanted to be. And Larin had killed it.

  Perhaps, he thought, that had been a mercy.

  More voices, this time with blurry faces. Human men and women; Shigar didn’t recognize any of them. He made out some words, though, including the hexes’ furious catch-cry. It was being chanted by a group of people, including a woman of middle years, with short ash-blond hair and intelligent eyes. Her hand was raised above her head. She was shaking her fist at the sky—but it wasn’t a sky at all. It was a roof. She was in a large space with a tubular tank at its center, filled with red.

  Shigar didn’t fight the vision. He just told it: I want to be inside her head.

  And he was. He was enfolded by a turbulent flow of thoughts and sensory impressions. He tumbled, slightly in awe of how easy it had been. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Perhaps there was something special about her, this Lema Xandret.

  For it was indeed her. He was buffeted by her rage. He found strength in her determination to live unfettered. He grew weary at the understanding that all things must eventually be compromised, or die. He felt satisfaction at all her achievements. He wept at the mingled love and loss of a child.

  Shigar looked through her eyes at the world she had adopted for her own, and felt pride tinged with worry, and an intense desire for revenge.

  We do not recognize your authority!

  And there it was, at last. Everything he had been looking for: the dense, metallic world, rich with change and vigor, where no one would have looked for it in a million years.

  His eyes snapped open. He didn’t feel the pain of the cuts to his palms. He had forgotten the various aches and pains of his body, earned the hard way on Hutta. He felt only a degree of gratitude that he had never experienced before, blended with a powerful sense of achievement.

  Climbing to his feet, he hurried to the crew quarters. Larin was already fast asleep. He thought about waking her to tell her the news but reined in the impulse. She deserved her rest. He could thank her later.

  Ula and Jet were in the cockpit. He clambered up the ladder and burst into their conversation.

  “I know where it is!”

  “The world?” asked Ula, looking up in surprise.

  “Yes. I found it!”

  “Good for you, mate,” said Jet. “Got some coordinates for me?”

  “Not exactly,” Shigar said, “but I can describe it to you. I think it’ll be fairly easy to pin down.”

  “Well, great. I’m very tired of the view here. Take a seat and we’ll get started.”

  Shigar felt his sense of triumph ebb slightly at the thought of what lay ahead of them.

  “What?” asked Ula, staring at his face. “Is there a problem?”

  “You could say that.”

  Their faces fell in unison as he told them.

  Finding the planet was one thing.

  Getting there would be another entirely.

  SPECIALIST PEDISIC LOOKED up as Ax walked into the quarantine bay. The space had been transformed. Large pieces of equipment hovered over the dissection table, connected by thick cables to the bulk cruiser’s main processor arrays. The remains of the hex had been splayed out like a delicate tapestry, revealing intricate details of its structure and function. The cell walls that made it robust as well as lightweight were threaded with shining metal, suggesting that they performed key functions as well as providing internal support. She saw several fist-sized globes like round, silver eggs nestling agai
nst more familiar components. The legs had been removed entirely from complex-looking joints and stacked like metal antlers in a transparisteel jar.

  “I have much to report, sir,” the specialist said. She had rolled her sleeves up, and her arms were smeared with brown-black goo up to her elbows.

  “Then do so.” Ax stood with her hands on her hips at one end of the table. She had been generous. The specialist had had more than an hour. If Darth Chratis had not been so conversational in his discipline, Ax would have come back much sooner.

  “Well, the first thing I can tell you is that this thing, whatever it is, isn’t finished.” Pedisic selected a slender-tipped tool from the many surrounding her work space and pointed as she talked. “See here: its neuro-web was interrupted before the completion of a full suite of reflex analogues. And here: there’s a full array of senses about to come online down this dorsal region, but it’s totally unconnected to the central computer. The reporting system has only grown to here and has yet to join the two.”

  “You mean it was released too early, before it was ready?”

  “There’s evidence to suggest that it was continuing to develop after it left the factory that built it. I suggest this thing would have finished itself, given time.”

  Ax remembered how ferociously the thing had fought. And it hadn’t even been complete! “What would the final form have been like?”

  “It’s impossible to say. The main data bank doesn’t contain a single template. Instead there are many, with lots of transitional forms. And there’s a biological component, too, that I find very puzzling. This brown stuff must perform some function, otherwise it wouldn’t be present in such quantities. Perhaps it acts as a randomizing agent, encouraging it to adapt more fluidly. It’s hard to analyze, though, because it’s been so severely cooked.”

  She looked at Ax reproachfully, as though blaming her for the condition of the sample. In this case, Ax was completely innocent. Either the Jedi or the Mandalorian had done that job for her.

  And either way, it was irrelevant.

  “So you’ve accessed the brain, then.”

  “Yes. Just this minute.”

  “How smart was it? Could it fly a ship, for instance?”

  “Not likely, my lord, but if it needed to, it could change itself so it could. Like birds grow new parts of their brains in spring to learn new songs. It’s just a matter of—”

  Ax waved her silent. “Is the data encoded?”

  “Naturally, but the cipher is based on an Imperial system that went out of use fifteen years ago.”

  When Lema Xandret fled the Empire, Ax remembered.

  “I’ll crack it soon. Don’t worry, my lord. The fact that the thing was incomplete actually made getting in easier. All I have to do is map the architecture and find my way around …”

  Ax didn’t pay attention to the specifics. And she hadn’t been aware that she’d looked worried. If this specialist couldn’t do the job, she’d just get another.

  “All I want to know is where this thing came from,” she said. “And I want to know now.”

  Specialist Pedisic nodded. “Yes, my lord. With your permission, I’ll resume my examination.”

  Ax indicated with a flick of one index finger that the specialist should return to work.

  While Ax waited, she paced the crowded space, reading raw data and coming to her own conclusions. Nothing she saw contradicted the specialist’s opinions, and there was much more to be absorbed than could have been crammed into that short conversation. The globes contained the hex’s primary processors, where sensory data converged, was exchanged, and provoked various environmental responses. The weapons on each hand were little different in principle from standard blaster technology, but remarkably miniaturized and integrated into a limb capable of gripping and supporting weight as well. This hex had no camouflage system to analyze, and unfortunately the electromirror defense was too badly damaged to reverse-engineer. Whole sections of its body had been fried to ash.

  “I’ve cracked the code, my lord,” said the specialist.

  Ax hurried to peer over her shoulder. Scrolling through a holopad was a list of symbols—the blocks from which the hex’s mind and all its actions were built. None of the commands, language rules, and algorithms, however, looked remotely familiar to Ax.

  “These controlled the hex? The droid, I mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “Could we use them to control others?”

  “I fear not. These particular commands are generated within the device itself—a unique and purely internal system for coordinating its many parts. Each droid would have a different system, so what we’ve gained is merely the language for this droid, which is now dead.”

  “All right, but you have translated it, in this case?”

  “Yes.”

  “So find me what I’m looking for. Time is short.” I have a Mandalorian to beat, she said silently to herself, and if I lose, you are going to pay dearly.

  The specialist bent low over the section of the hex she had exposed, remotely operating manipulators capable of tinier measurements than any human could make. Data scrolled dizzyingly in all directions through the holopad, too fast for Ax to follow. Her head soon ached from concentrating too hard on something she didn’t really understand.

  “You have one minute,” she told the specialist.

  “My lord, I’ve found it,” Pedisic said. “Name, hyperspace coordinates—”

  “Give them to me.” A sudden upwelling of excitement filled her. “Now!”

  Where are you, Mother?

  Specialist Pedisic rattled off a long string of numbers. Ax closed her eyes, visualizing roughly where the location fit into the galactic disk.

  It didn’t. It was well above the Mid Rim, in the middle of nowhere.

  Ax opened her eyes. “Are you sure that’s what’s in its head?”

  “Positive, sir. Although it doesn’t make sense, does it? There’s nothing out there. Nothing at all.”

  Well, Ax told herself, that wasn’t entirely true. There were cold dwarfs and orphaned gas giants and all manner of strange stellar beasts. And it was an undiscovered world, after all, fit for traitorous droid makers on the run from the Sith. It wasn’t unreasonable that people desperate to keep their location a secret might have traveled parsecs out of their way to obscure any chance of pursuit.

  But what had led Lema Xandret to that isolated haven in the first place? What had encouraged her to look in that direction? The odds of her taking a ship on a long jump to nowhere and just happening to arrive at a habitable world were minute.

  “Run the coordinates through Imperial records,” she told the specialist. “I’m guessing we’ll find something in there.”

  The request went to the ship’s data banks. Ax tapped her finger on the dissection table as she waited for the response. It took longer than expected, and she had time enough to observe just how much the baked organic residue looked like dried blood …

  With a chime, the holopad produced a single line of information.

  “Now, that really is impossible,” said the specialist.

  “Try again.”

  The specialist repeated the procedure from scratch, extracting the embedded data and feeding it into the records.

  The same result came back.

  “It must be a bluff,” the specialist said. “A false location to throw us off the scent.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Ax. “Everything about it looks wrong, but that tells me we must be right. I told you we’d find something, didn’t I?”

  “But it’s a black hole,” said the specialist.

  “I know. I can read it with my own eyes.”

  Ax felt as though that distant, dead star had reached out and clutched her with its irresistible gravity. She was absolutely certain that this was where she would find Lema Xandret, builder of droids who spoke with her own voice.

  “I think you’d better give me the name, now,” she said. “We’ll be lea
ving as soon as the course is plotted.”

  IT WAS AN UNASSUMING NAME, Ula thought as the Auriga Fire shook around him, for a colony that shouldn’t exist.

  Sebaddon.

  “You know we’re insane, don’t you?” Jet said over the sound of the ship’s straining hyperdrives. “If the black hole’s mass shadow doesn’t tear us to pieces, its gravity will suck us in when we arrive.”

  “We plotted the course to account for either possibility,” said Shigar. “We’ll be okay. Probably.”

  “I’ll try not to think about it,” said Ula through ground teeth.

  “I’m just trying not to throw up,” said Larin.

  Ula twisted in his seat to look back at her. She winked.

  “How much longer?” Shigar asked.

  His calm confidence was infuriating. Ula didn’t know how Jet put up with it.

  “Somewhere between a minute and never. Most likely the latter.”

  The ship creaked from nose to tail as though something had grabbed it at either end and twisted. Ula clutched the arms of his chair and closed his eyes. This wasn’t what he had signed up for. Being an informer was supposed to be sitting in the shadows, stealing information, and plotting the odd assassination. It wasn’t fighting killer droids, being tortured by Mandalorians, or diving headlong into a black hole. That’s what Cipher Agents did.

  A strong hand gripped his elbow. His eyes flickered open.

  “Don’t worry,” said Larin. “We’ll make it.”

  He nodded and forced his hands to release their grip on the chair. Let her think he was reassured, when in fact he was the exact opposite. Shigar’s psychometric revelation had raised her faith in him to new heights, although there was a new tension between them now, as though their relationship had fundamentally shifted. That, Ula thought, might be the most galling thing about his situation.