Star Wars: Riptide

by Paul S. Kemp

  “I’m fine, Ar-Six.”

  Khedryn, Marr, and R-6 crowded around him. Khedryn took one side, Marr the other, and they helped him to his feet.

  “Where’s the supply ship?” Jaden asked.

  Khedryn and Marr glanced at each other. R-6 beeped the droid equivalent of a shrug.

  “We just got aboard, Master,” Marr said. “No one is on the scanners.”

  “It’s good to have you back aboard,” Jaden said to Khedryn.

  “Good to be back,” he said.

  Marr put a hand on Khedryn’s shoulder in welcome.

  “Let’s get to the cockpit,” Jaden said. He shed pieces of the hardsuit as he went. When they reached it, they could see the supply ship through the canopy, moving away from them. They could not see the scout flyer. Marr bent over the scanners.

  “The supply ship is under ion-engine power, heading to a jump point. We can’t catch it.”

  “No,” Jaden said. “But we can follow it. We’ve still got the beacon aboard.”

  “A beacon,” Khedryn said. “That’s how you tracked me?”

  “Took one of your signal beacons from the hold,” Jaden explained.

  Marr, still eyeing the scanner, said, “The scout flyer is headed away into the deep system. The second escape pod docked with it.”

  “Then the Umbaran is aboard it,” Khedryn said.

  “An Umbaran?” Jaden asked. “The person who called himself Nyss?”

  “Yeah, he’s Umbaran. And he … did something to the clones, Jaden. Cut them off from the Force somehow.”

  Jaden shook his head. “That’s not possible.”

  Khedryn ran a hand over his jaw, testing it as if it hurt. “I’m only telling you what I saw. When the clones fought him, they couldn’t use the Force. Even their lightsabers were nonfunctional. They were working and then they weren’t.”

  “You’ve never heard of anything like that, Master?” Marr asked.

  “Never. You’re sure?” Jaden asked Khedryn. “Maybe it was a device of some kind.”

  “Some kind of neurological scrambler, perhaps,” Marr offered. “Or maybe something unique to the clones, a vulnerability attributable to their illness.”

  Khedryn shook his head. “I don’t think so. It seemed to be the Umbaran himself. Look, I don’t pretend to understand it. But that’s how it seemed to me. He cut the clones off from the Force. Well, all but one.”

  “What do you mean?” Jaden asked. “Which one?”

  Khedryn swallowed and would not meet Jaden’s eyes. “Soldier, he called himself. I helped him get free of the Umbaran so I could …” He trailed off, then said, “One of the clones is a little girl. I couldn’t leave her to the Umbaran.”

  Jaden understood completely. “I would have done the same thing.”

  Jaden’s words caused Khedryn to puff a little with pride. “Well, yes. Right.”

  “So why did he want you, Master?” Marr asked. “And what’s his interest in this?”

  Jaden shook his head. Matters remained muddled. He had no clear insight into events. Khedryn seemed to want to say something.

  “Khedryn?” Jaden asked. “What else?”

  Khedryn cleared his throat, then looked away. “Jaden, I don’t know how to tell you this.…”

  All at once, Jaden understood. “I know already. One of them is a clone of me.”

  R-6 whistled in surprise.

  Khedryn looked up, his swollen eye nearly bugging out of his head. “How did you know?”

  “I fought him back on Fhost.”

  Khedryn looked appalled. “And you—Well, that must have felt … weird.”

  Jaden shrugged. “Which one is it? Soldier?”

  “Yes,” Khedryn said. “And, Jaden, he was … different from the other clones.”

  “What do you mean?” Marr asked.

  “Different how?” asked Jaden.

  “Not as sick as the others, maybe not sick at all. They seemed crazy, but he just seemed … confused. Angry, but not crazy. When they wanted to kill me, he tried to stop them. There’s something about him.…” He looked up. “He’s got your eyes. You know what I mean? He’s looking for something.”

  Jaden did not know what to say.

  “He’s more like you than in just looks,” Khedryn said thoughtfully. “And he seemed able to at least partially resist the Umbaran’s power. Maybe you can, too?”

  “Maybe,” Jaden said, oddly troubled to hear that he and the clone shared a temperament.

  People are not equations, Marr had said. Jaden wondered.

  “We need to get after them,” he said.

  “The Umbaran or the clones?” Marr asked.

  “The clones.”

  Khedryn cleared his throat. “He said not to follow. Soldier said that. Why follow? There’s only three left. One is a child.”

  “I would never hurt a child, Khedryn,” Jaden said.

  “I know that.”

  “But that clone killed people on Fhost. They’re dangerous still.”

  Khedryn sighed. “Jedi, I just want to catch my breath for a moment. You know?”

  “I do,” Jaden said, nodding. “But there’s no time.”

  SOLDIER SCOOPED GRACE UP AND CARRIED HER TO THE cockpit. Seer awaited them there, conscious, standing before the copilot’s chair, staring out the transparisteel. She did not look at them when she spoke.

  “There are only we three now.”

  “What happened to your face?” Grace asked her, eyeing the bruise on her cheek.

  “Shh,” Soldier said, and placed her in one of the crew chairs. He buckled her in, tousled her hair. “Everything is all right now,” he said, and smiled.

  She did not smile back, and he felt the seed of grief within her. She was trying not to let it grow roots, but he suspected it would. She’d lost her mother—and everyone else in the Community except him and Seer.

  He found a loaded hypo and injected Grace. She didn’t make a sound. He hoped the medicine would work fast. He turned and put his hands on Seer’s shoulders and eased her into the copilot’s chair. She did not resist, and he felt her skin roil under his touch. She, too, was failing. Everyone was, except him.

  “You need meds, Seer,” he said.

  “I told you no more, Soldier,” she said. “We’re soon to see Mother. No more meds. Mother will heal us all.”

  “I’m not sick,” he said.

  “Not in body,” she said, still staring out into the black. Soldier wondered what she saw there.

  He decided not to argue. Grace had her meds and that was what mattered. He took the pilot’s seat and looked at the navicomp. The coordinates were still on the screen, a numerical code that, if Seer was right, would lead them to Mother.

  “Are you ready now, Soldier?” Seer asked, finally looking at him. “Now, after all of this, are you ready?”

  He looked out the canopy, back to Grace, and nodded.

  “Let’s go to Mother,” he said, and engaged the hyperdrive.

  Mother felt the connection to Seer grow stronger. She sensed loss through the connection. Something had happened to Seer and the others she journeyed with.

  I will make it all worthwhile, she projected to Seer. Come home. Come home, now. Soon, Mother would be free.

  Nyss scrolled through the coordinates in the scout flyer’s navicomp for the coordinates he had uploaded from the supply ship. He knew where the clones were going, and he knew that Jaden Korr would follow them there.

  The coordinates targeted a system deep in the Unknown Regions. Very little data about it existed. The system’s star was a pulsar, and the system itself exhibited extraordinarily high levels of radiation. Calculations based on astronomical observations confirmed the presence of two planets and an asteroid belt, but no planetary survey showed up in the records.

  “You did well recording the course,” he said to his sister’s corpse. He tried not to notice that her chin was on her chest. He left her beside him because he could not bear to part with her, becau
se he could not bear to be alone in their ship, because he wanted a reminder to keep his pain fresh.

  But he knew he would not be able to face Soldier and Jaden without help.

  “I’m going to awaken the Iteration,” he said to Syll. “It’s time.”

  But first he needed to put some distance between himself, the Prime, and the Jedi. He input into the navicomp a short hyperspace jump into a neighboring uninhabited system and engaged the hyperdrive. The ship dashed into the blue tunnel of hyperspace.

  When it came out, he would awaken the Iteration. Then he would track down the Jedi and the Prime. He would do what he had been sent by Wyyrlok to do. Then he would kill everyone else.

  Marr, on a scanner, said, “The Umbaran’s ship is jumping out of the system.”

  Khedryn cursed.

  Jaden put a hand on his shoulder. “There’s little we could have done from Junker.”

  Khedryn nodded. “Let’s hope he’s gone for good.”

  R-6 appeared, his mechanical arms bearing medical supplies. He offered them to Khedryn. Khedryn considered them, took them, and stuffed gauze into his nostrils.

  “You’re all right, droid,” he said.

  Jaden looked at him with a surprised smile.

  “People change, Jedi. Otherwise we’re just droids of flesh. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “So I did,” Jaden said.

  Marr said, “The supply ship’s hyperdrive is spooling up, too.”

  As one, they all looked out the canopy. The supply ship vanished in a blink, jumping out of the system.

  “Let’s get a lock on our tracking beacon and follow them,” Jaden said.

  “They’re looking for someone or something they call ‘Mother.’ To me, it sounded like a religious thing.” Khedryn fixed Jaden with a meaningful stare. “I said he had your eyes, yeah? Maybe he had a Force Vision, too?”

  Jaden looked out into the black, pondering.

  “Go get me some caf, droid,” Khedryn said. “You’ve got to earn your keep on this tub, and med supplies don’t do it. We run on caf out here.”

  R-6 made a long-suffering series of whistles and beeps and wheeled off for the galley.

  Across the void, through the Power, Mother felt Seer and the others getting closer, felt the comforting connection of their minds, so welcome to her after eons of solitude.

  Mother was calling them to her, and they were answering.

  And when they arrived, they would free her. Seer would be the one who would provide Mother the flesh she has craved for millennia.

  She hoped for this, allowed herself to believe that it would be so.

  She knew that Seer hoped for things, too, and that Seer allowed herself to believe they would be so.

  In that way, Mother learned how to lie.

  She’d used others in the past, the shells of beings that littered her prison, but all of them had crumpled under her embrace, their form unable to bear her touch.

  Matters would be different this time.

  So she hoped. So she believed.

  Perhaps she had begun to lie to herself? How would she know?

  She’d been alone so long, adrift in nothingness, existing at the bottom of a deep hole from which she could look out and up at the universe but never experience any of it. Her cage condemned her to life alone, as an observer, never as a participant.

  She wished to end her solitude, to experience the universe she’d felt indirectly through the millennia. She wished to express the rage she had harbored for so long.

  Seer would provide her a way.

  Soldier’s hands shook on the stick as the supply ship started to come out of hyperspace. He tried to hide the shaking from Seer. He hoped for, even secretly expected, beauty, the light of revelation, Mother, and meaning. After all, Seer had been right about everything up to then, and her visions had led them there.

  And his purpose, he thought—he believed—had been to bring them.

  The cockpit was silent as the blue swirl gave way to the black of ordinary space. Soldier held his breath, hopeful, pensive, desperate.

  An alarm began to wail the moment they entered normal space. The sudden burst of sound startled him and it took a moment for him to respond. The readout showed a system bathed in radiation.

  Grace covered her ears, whimpering and rocking in her seat. Seer seemed barely to notice the sound. She simply stared out at the system as if its dark expanse held truth.

  Soldier quickly adjusted the deflectors to account for radiation in-system. The alarms went quiet. He checked the sensors.

  “The dose was small,” he said. “No damage.”

  Seer nodded absently. She was sweating, flush, her dark eyes sunk deep in the pits of their sockets.

  “It’ll be all right,” Soldier said over his shoulder to Grace. “It’s all right.”

  At the sound of his voice, she opened her eyes and stopped whimpering. She looked tiny in her seat, fragile. He was pleased to see that her skin no longer crawled. The meds had done their work, for now.

  He turned back to the instruments. They had emerged from hyperspace at the edge of the system. Through the cockpit’s transparisteel, he could see the distant pulsar, a dark ball resting in the middle of a network of colorful arcs and whorls that stretched out from the pulsar in beautiful curtains hundreds of thousands of kilometers on a side. He presumed the light show was caused by the interaction of the pulsar’s electromagnetic field with some ambient energy in the system. He’d never seen anything like it in simulations.

  They’d found beauty, at least. Now they needed revelation.

  “Pretty,” Grace said, standing up in her seat. Soldier nodded, pleased to hear the wonder in her voice.

  A thick belt of asteroids ringed the pulsar, visible as an irregular black line against the background glow of the inner system. Sensors showed many of them to be metallic, an odd alloy that the scanner could not identify. He tried to refine the scan, but the metal defied identification.

  Two small planets, barren and rocky, orbited the pulsar in the deep system, not far from the supply ship. Both were in tidal lock. Neither could possibly be inhabited.

  He checked and rechecked the scanner, looked for something he might have missed. He found nothing, so he went over the readings again, his hands moving more rapidly across the control pad, his frustration building.

  How could there be nothing?

  They had come so far, done so much, done too much for there to be nothing. Emptiness yawned in him, despair, a feeling similar to the emptiness he’d felt when the Umbaran had almost disconnected him from the Force. Except now he’d been disconnected from hope.

  “Seer,” he said, his voice dull. He could not believe it. They had sacrificed everything to see an interstellar light show. Seer had been wrong.

  She gave no indication she’d heard. Concentration creased her brow.

  He was already sick of her feigned religiosity. Her trances were nothing more than the fevered imaginings of an ill mind. For Grace, he tried to keep the disappointment from his voice.

  “Seer, there’s nothing here. We need to leave.”

  “There,” Seer said, nodding at the larger, nearer planet. “Go there, Soldier.”

  Her refusal to acknowledge how wrong she’d been caused anger to bubble in him, to put a sharp edge on his voice. His knuckles whitened around the stick.

  “There’s nothing there, Seer. It’s a dead planet. The whole system is dead.”

  She turned in her seat to face him. There was no doubt in her eyes and her lack of it drove him to distraction. “Go, I said.”

  His anger boiled in the face of her ridiculous conviction. Unable to stop himself, he leapt from his seat, took her by the shoulders, and shook her, the power of the dark side filling him. Words burst from him.

  “Did you hear me, woman?! There’s nothing here! It was all a mistake, lies! Everything was for nothing! Do you understand? For nothing!”

  She did not resist him; she only smiled, and h
e found the expression so oddly inappropriate that the anger went out of him in a rush. Breathing heavily, he let her go.

  Grace stared at him wide-eyed, her legs pulled to her chest, cowering in her seat. He felt ashamed of himself.

  “It’s all right, Grace. Everything is okay. I just … forgot myself for a moment.”

  Seer put a fever-heated hand to his face. He recoiled at her touch, suddenly disgusted by the feel of her, but she did not lower her hand.

  “Your belief has always been so fragile, Soldier. Mine is not so easily eroded. Do as I say. Take us to the larger planet, around to the dark side.”

  He searched her eyes for a lie, for doubt, but saw none. Her certainty took him aback. “There’s nothing there,” he said, his tone doubtful. “The scanners cannot reach that side,” she said. “The system is full of radiation,” he said. “Nothing could survive there.”

  “Mother is there,” Seer said. She smiled and her flesh pulsed, a bubble that caused her cheek to swell and turned her smile into a leer. “You were to bring us here. Do so.”

  Hearing her state the purpose he had set for himself made the hairs on his neck stand up. Moving as if on autopilot, he took his seat, put his hands on the stick, and angled the ship toward the large, black rock.

  “Around to the dark side,” she said. “We are almost there.”

  Grace crept out of her seat and stood at the arm of Soldier’s chair, staring expectantly out the canopy. The planet grew larger as they neared it. Soldier’s heart beat faster with every ten thousand kilometers they covered. He realized he was holding his breath, daring to hope even when reason told him that hope was foolish.

  Beside him, Grace was doing the same. He swung the ship around to the dark side of the planet, the side that had been shielded from his scans.

  And when they saw, Soldier and Grace gasped as one. Seer only smiled.

  * * *

  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.