The Old Republic Series

by Sean Williams

  She thought back to the pain she’d felt when Master Zallow had died. She had felt it physically, a searing shock in her abdomen that burned away doubt. Closing her eyes, she inhaled deeply, a new, clean breath, and shed her outer Jedi robes, the robes she’d earned under Master Zallow’s tutelage.

  She could not avenge him as a Jedi. She could and should avenge him as his friend.

  “What are you doing, Aryn?” Vollen called from behind her.

  She turned to see that Vollen and Keevo had followed her to her ship. Vollen wore a concerned frown.

  “Are you following me?” Aryn asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “What are you doing, Aryn?”

  She put one hand on the ladder to her cockpit. “I already told you, Vollen. Something for Master Zallow.”

  “But your robes? I don’t understand.”

  She could offer no explanation that would satisfy him. She turned, climbed the ladder to the cockpit, and pulled on her helmet. Thankfully, T6 held any questions it might have had.

  Vollen and Keevo walked toward the ship. Aryn felt Vollen’s alarm, his uncertainty. He stopped when he reached Aryn’s robes. He looked as if he were standing over a grave. Perhaps he knew what it meant that Aryn had left them there.

  “Tell Master Dar’nala I am sorry,” she called to him. “Tell her, Vollen.”

  Vollen and Keevo did not come any closer. It was as though the discarded robes demarcated some boundary they could not cross.

  “Sorry for what?” Vollen called. “Aryn, please tell me what you’re doing. Why are you leaving your robes?”

  “She will understand, Vollen. Be well.”

  She lowered the transparisteel canopy on the cockpit and could not hear whatever Vollen said in response. The engines grew louder and Vollen stood on the landing pad, staring up at Aryn. Keevo stood beside him, his dark eyes on Aryn’s robes.

  “Get us out of here, Tee-six,” she said. “Set a course for Vulta, in the Mid Rim.”

  She knew someone there, once. She hoped he was still there. If anyone could get her to Coruscant, it was the Z-man.

  The droid beeped agreement, and the Raven’s engines lifted it from the pad.

  She looked down one last time to see Vollen gathering her robes with the same delicacy he might use to bear a fallen comrade.

  Malgus replayed the exchange with Adraas and Angral again and again in his mind. His anger remained unabated when he stepped off the lift onto the roof of the Senate Building and strode toward his transport, ignoring the guards who saluted him as he stalked past. The transport pilot waited on the lowered landing ramp.

  “You received a location from Darth Angral?” Malgus asked the pilot. “A hospital?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Take me there.”

  He boarded the transport, the doors whispered closed, and the ship soon lifted off into the hazy destruction of Coruscant’s night sky. They did not have far to fly. In under a quarter hour the pilot’s voice carried over the intercom.

  “Coming up on the facility now, my lord. Where shall I set down?”

  Below, Malgus saw the multistoried rectangle of the medical facility. Swoops, aircars, speeders, and medical transports crowded the artificially lit landing pad on its roof. Dozens of people moved among the vehicles—doctors, nurses, medics, the wounded. Bodies lay on gurneys here and there.

  On the ground level the scene was much the same. Vehicles and people clotted the artery of the road and a mass of people thronged the main entrance to the facility.

  “Set down at ground level,” Malgus ordered.

  Some of the people on the roof noticed the transport’s Imperial markings. Faces stared skyward, uncertain, frightened, and a few people ran for the lifts. One tripped over a gurney and fell. Another ran into a medic and knocked him flat.

  “Darth Angral temporarily commandeered this hospital to triage Imperial wounded,” the pilot said over the intercom. “They’ve all been moved to Steadfast by now.”

  “Not all of them,” Malgus said, but not loudly enough to be heard over the intercom.

  “There are a lot of people down there, my lord. I don’t see a clear spot to land.”

  Malgus stared down at them, his rage bubbling. “Land. They will move.”

  The transport wheeled around, hovered, and began to descend. The crowd below parted as the ship neared the duracrete. Malgus could hear the shouting of the crowd through the bulkheads.

  “My lord, should I send for some troops? To guard you?”

  “I do not require a guard. Keep the ship secure. I will not be long.” Malgus pressed the switch that opened the side door of the transport, and a cacophony of sirens and angry shouts poured through the opening.

  Malgus, his own anger more than a match for that of the crowd, discarded his cloak, revealing his scarred face and respirator, and stepped out onto the landing ramp.

  Upon seeing him, the crowd fell mute. Only the sirens continued to howl. A sea of faces stared up at him, pale in the streetlights, frightened, smeared with dust and blood, but above all, angry. Their collective rage and fear washed over him. He stood before it, eyeing one of them after another. None could hold his gaze.

  He walked down the ramp and into their midst. They gave way before him. The moment he put his foot on the road the shouting renewed.

  “Monster!”

  “Murderer!”

  “We need medical supplies!”

  “He is alone. Kill him.”

  “Coward!”

  His presence among them focused their rage. As the tumult grew, he could not distinguish individual words. He heard only a single, prolonged, hate-filled roar, a wave of fists and bared teeth. It echoed his own emotion, fed it, amplified it.

  From somewhere ahead, a fist-sized piece of duracrete arced over the crowd toward him. Without moving, he stopped it in mid-flight with the Force. He let it hang suspended in the air for a moment, so the crowd could see it, before he used the Force to crush it to pieces.

  The crowd went silent again as the pebbles and dust rained down on the road, on their heads.

  “Who threw that?” Malgus asked, the heat of his anger stoked.

  Sirens wailed. A cough from somewhere. Fearful eyes everywhere.

  Malgus raised his voice. “I said who threw that?”

  No response. The crowd’s anger turned to anxiety.

  “Disperse,” Malgus said, his own anger building as theirs receded. “Now.”

  Perhaps sensing his anger, those near him started to back away. Some at the fringe of the crowd turned and fled. Most held their ground, though they looked uncertainly at one another.

  “We have family inside.”

  “I need care,” someone else shouted.

  Malgus fell into the Force as his brewing anger bubbled to the surface. “I said disperse!”

  When the crowd did not respond to his demand, he slammed a fist into his palm and let anger-fueled power explode outward from his body. Screams sounded as the blast shoved everything away from him in all directions.

  Bodies flew backward, slammed into one another, into the walls, against and through windows. The transport he’d rode on lurched from the blast. The doors of the medical facility flew from their mounts and crashed to the ground.

  The sirens continued to wail.

  Partially vented, he came back to himself.

  Moans and pained whimpers sounded from all around him. A child was crying. Bodies lay scattered about like so many rag dolls. Shattered glass covered the ground. Speeders and swoops lay on their sides. Loose papers stirred in the wind.

  Unmoved, Malgus walked the now-clear path into the medical facility.

  Inside, patients and visitors cowered behind chairs, desks, one another. Malgus’s breathing was the loudest sound in the room. No one dared look at him.

  “Where are the Jedi?” someone said.

  “The Jedi are dead in their Temple,” Malgus said. “
Where I left them. There is no one to save you.”

  Someone wept. Another moaned.

  Malgus found an overweight human man in the pale blue uniform of a hospital worker and pulled him to his feet by his shirt.

  “I am looking for a Twi’lek woman with a scar on her throat,” Malgus said. “She suffered two blaster wounds and was brought here earlier today. Her name is Eleena.”

  The man’s eyes darted around as if they were seeking escape from his head. “I don’t know of any Twi’lek. I can check the logs.”

  “If harm has come to her here …”

  A heavyset nurse, her red hair pulled back into a tight bun, rose from behind a desk. Her uniform looked like a blue tent on her stout body. Freckles dotted her face. “I know the woman you mean. I can take you to her.”

  Malgus cast the man to the floor and followed the nurse through the corridors. The air smelled of antiseptic. Walls and floors were clean white or silver.

  Staff and medical droids hurried through the halls, barely noticing Malgus, despite his disfigurement. A female voice over the intercom almost continually called doctors to this or that treatment room, or announced codes in various places in the facility.

  Malgus and the nurse took a lift up to a treatment ward, walking past rooms overcrowded with patients. A woman’s crying carried through the hall. Moans of pain sounded from other rooms. A team of surgeons hurried past, their faces hidden behind masks spattered with blood.

  The nurse did not look at Malgus when she spoke.

  “The Twi’lek woman was dropped at the doors by an unmarked transport. We did not realize she was … Imperial.”

  Malgus grunted. “You would not have treated her had you known?”

  The nurse stopped, turned on her heel, and stared Malgus in his scarred face.

  “Of course we would have treated her. We are not savages.”

  Malgus did not miss the woman’s subtle emphasis on we.

  He decided to allow the nurse her moment of defiance. Her spirit impressed him. “Just take me to her.”

  Eleena lay in a bed in a small treatment room with three other patients. One of them, an elderly man, was curled up in a fetal position on the bed, moaning, his sheets bloody. Another, a middle-aged woman with a lacerated face, watched Malgus and the nurse enter, her expression vacant. The third appeared to be asleep.

  A fluid line was hooked to Eleena’s unwounded arm and several cables—cables!—connected her to monitoring equipment. The facility must have been stretched to use such dated technology. Her blaster wounds, at least, had been treated and bandaged. The arm with the wounded shoulder had been stabilized in a sling.

  Eleena saw him, sat up, and smiled.

  He realized that she was the only person in the galaxy who smiled when she saw him.

  “Veradun,” she said.

  Seeing her face and hearing her voice affected him more than he liked. The anger drained out of him as if he had a hole in his heel. Relief took its place and he did not fight it, though he realized that he had let his feelings for her grow dangerously strong.

  When he looked at Eleena, he was looking at his own weakness.

  Angral’s words bounced around his consciousness.

  Passions can lead to mistakes.

  He had to have her, and he had to stay true to the Empire.

  He had to square a circle.

  He resolved to find a way.

  He went to her bedside, touched her face with his callused hand, and started disconnecting her from the fluid line and cables.

  “You will be treated aboard my ship. In proper facilities.”

  A man’s voice from behind him said, “You there! Stop! You can’t do that!”

  Malgus looked over his shoulder to see a male nurse standing in the doorway. The man quailed when he saw Malgus’s visage but he held his ground.

  “She is not cleared for discharge.” The man started into the room as if to stop Malgus, but the female nurse who had led Malgus to Eleena interposed her wide body.

  “Leave them be, Tal. They are leaving.”

  “But—”

  “Leave it alone.”

  Malgus could not see the fat nurse’s face but he imagined her trying with her expression to communicate to the male nurse that Malgus was a Sith. He asked Eleena, “Can you walk?”

  Before she could answer, he scooped her up in his arms.

  “I can walk,” she said halfheartedly.

  He ignored her, brushed past the nurses and into the corridor. For a time, Eleena looked into the rooms they passed, at the wounded, the dying. But soon it became too much and she buried her head in Malgus’s chest. Malgus enjoyed the feel of her in his arms, the warmth she radiated, the musky smell of her.

  “You are thoughtful,” she whispered. The feel of her breath on his ear sent pangs of desire through him.

  “I am thinking of geometry,” he said. “Of squares and circles.”

  “That’s an odd train of thought.”

  “Perhaps not as odd as you think.”

  When they exited the facility, she saw the dozens of bodies strewn about the ground. Medical teams hovered over several, treating their wounds. Faces turned to Malgus, eyes wide, but no one said a word as he walked toward the transport.

  “What happened here? To these people? It was not like this when I arrived.”

  Malgus said nothing.

  “They are afraid of you.”

  “They should be.”

  When they got aboard the transport, Malgus instructed the pilot to fly them to Valor, the orbiting cruiser he commanded. Then he laid Eleena down on a reclinable couch and covered her with a blanket. She touched his hand as he tucked her in.

  “There is gentleness in you, Veradun.”

  He pulled his hand away from her and stood. “If you ever call me Veradun in public again I will kill you. Do you understand?”

  Her smile melted in the heat of his anger. She looked as if he had punched her in the stomach. She sat up on her elbow. “Why are you saying this?”

  His voice came out loud and harsh. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes! Yes!” She threw off the blanket, rose, and stood before him, her body quaking. “But why are you so angry? Why?”

  He stared into her lovely face, swallowed, and shook his head. His anger was only partly her fault. He was angry at Adraas, Angral, the Emperor himself. She was just a convenient focus for it.

  “You must do as I ask, Eleena,” he said, more softly. “Please.”

  “I will, Malgus.” She stepped forward, raised a hand, and traced the ruined lines written in the skin of his face. Her touch put a charge in him.

  “I love you, Malgus.” She peeled away his respirator to reveal the ruins of his mouth. “Do you love me?”

  He licked his scarred lips, his thoughts whirling, again no words coming.

  “You don’t have to answer,” she said, smiling, her voice soft. “I know that you do.”

  Zeerid checked his appearance in the small mirror in the ship’s refresher and chided himself for neglecting to shave. He activated the ship’s maintenance droid and stepped out into the bustle of the docks.

  Cargo carts and droids whipped past at breakneck speeds, signal horns clearing the path before them. Treaded droids motored along the walkways. Crew members and dockworkers plied their trade, loading and unloading crates of cargo with the help of crane droids. One of the dockmasters, a fat human with a bald head but a long beard and mustache, walked among the chaos, occasionally shouting an order to someone on the dock, occasionally mouthing something into his comlink. He carried a huge torque wrench in one hand and looked as if he wanted to whack something, or someone, with it. The air smelled faintly of vented gas and engine exhaust, but mostly it smelled like the lake.

  The city of Yinta Lake ringed the largest freshwater lake on the planet, Lake Yinta. Geothermal vents kept the water warm even in winter and the differential between the water temperature and the autumn air caused the lake to sw
eat steam, so the air always felt thick, greasy. It reminded Zeerid of decay, and every time he returned he felt as though the city had decomposed a little more in his absence.

  Yinta Lake had begun as an unnamed winter getaway for the planet’s wealthy—those who’d made their fortunes in arms manufacturing—the mansions forming a thin ring around the lakeshore. Back then, the ring had been called the wealth belt.

  Over time, the presence of the wealthy had attracted a middling-sized spaceport to bring offworld goods to the onworld money. That had brought workers, then merchants, then the not-so-wealthy, then the very poor.

  And by then the unnamed vacation spot had become Yinta, a town, and it had not stopped growing since. Now it was a metropolis—Yinta Lake—an accretion disk of people and buildings that collected around the gravitational pull of the lake.

  In time, shipping had polluted the lake’s water, the wealthy had mostly fled, and the city had begun a slow spiral into decrepitude. The once grand mansions on the shore of the lake had been sold off to developers and converted to cheap housing. The wealth belt had become slums and loading docks.

  Zeerid had grown up in the slums, smelling the acrid, rotting odor of the lake every day of his childhood. He had provided better for his daughter, but not by much.

  The deep, bass boom of a horn carried across the city, the call of one of the enormous flatbed cargo ships that moved goods and people across the lake and up and down the river that fed it. Zeerid smiled when he heard it. He’d awakened to that sound almost every day of his childhood.

  He stepped into the tumult, feeling oddly at home and very much looking forward to seeing his daughter.

  From the haircut, muscular build, and upright posture, Vrath made the pilot as former military. Vrath, too, was ex-military, having served in the Imperial infantry.

  The man smiled as he walked and Vrath found that he liked the man immediately.

  Too bad he’d probably have to kill him.

  Holding the nanodroid solution dispenser in a slack arm, Vrath knifed through the crowd toward the pilot. He cut in front of him, slowing him, just another body in the press, and squeezed a dollop of the suspension on the ground at their feet.