by Paul S. Kemp
The Iteration’s tone caused Nyss to pull up and slow the ship. At that speed, he maneuvered easily through the slow-moving asteroids of the field, but the freighter vanished from sight, lost amid the floating rocks.
“There, above the nearest planet,” the Iteration said.
“I don’t see it,” Nyss said, looking out the cockpit.
“Get above the belt.”
Nyss saw the scan readout in his HUD, which indicated a huge structure in geosynchronous orbit above the rocky surface of a desolate planet. He pulled the flyer above the plane of the asteroid belt and caused the image in the transparisteel canopy to magnify.
There, he saw it clearly—an enormous, greenish lozenge floating above the planet, connected to the surface by a miles-long shaft. He did not need further scans to know that the station was a mechano-organic construct. He recognized the telltale signs of Rakatan technology, the same technology reflected in the mindspears he carried.
“What is that?” the Iteration asked.
“A Rakatan station,” Nyss said.
The Iteration did not respond. Perhaps his memory implants did not include anything about the Rakatan Infinite Empire.
Nyss saw two ships docked to the station: the medical supply ship hijacked by the clones, and the small ship’s boat that had been attached to the YT freighter.
Jaden Korr and the Prime were both aboard the station, it seemed.
He gave one last look back for the YT, saw nothing, fired the engines to full, and shot across space toward the station.
Jaden ignited his yellow blade and Marr activated his purple one. Among the walking dead Jaden noted humans, Rodians, Kaleesh, and a dozen other species, many of which he did not recognize. Thin lines glowed under their flesh, the same glowing filaments that lined the walls. Somehow they were connected to the station, or the station was connected to them.
“Let the Force flow through you,” Jaden said to Marr.
The dead picked up speed, their shambling stride giving way to a faster walk. Their mouths were open but no sound emerged. They were an army of clawed hands and teeth.
Jaden fell into the Force as they approached. He unleashed a blast of power that struck the leading corpses and they exploded in a shower of bone and dried flesh. Marr did the same, managing to knock several to the ground.
Again Jaden unleased a blast, again destroying corpses by the dozens. And then the dead were upon them: empty eyes, clawed fingers, teeth, and the swirl of dark-side energy that animated them.
Jaden whirled among them, his yellow blade a scythe harvesting the dead. He kept one eye on Marr as he slew, watching his apprentice slash with his blade, fire his blaster, slash, stab, and fire. Jaden decapitated a corpse and loosed a blast of energy that exploded another five. His weapon rose and fell, rose and fell. He lost count of how many he felled, how many Marr felled, how long they’d been fighting. The animated corpses were slow, mindless, more annoyance than threat.
After a time, he and Marr stood alone in the corridor amid the dried remains of hundreds of dead. One of the bodies stirred at Jaden’s foot. He crushed its skull under his boot and deactivated his blade.
“Are you all right?” he asked Marr.
Marr deactivated his blade but did not holster his blaster. “Fine, Master.”
“That was a delaying tactic,” Jaden said. “The clones passed unmolested.”
“But who is trying to delay us?” Marr asked.
“Let’s go find out,” Jaden said, and they sprinted down the corridor.
Sweat made Khedryn’s hands slick on the controls. He had no choice but to keep flying at speed, to risk Junker getting pulverized against an asteroid to avoid its destruction by the Umbaran’s lasers. Spinning Junker ninety degrees, he shot through a narrow gap between two asteroids about to collide. He slammed the stick down, cutting under a third large asteroid, then pulled it up and nearly scraped the surface of another. If he’d been standing on Junker’s exterior, he could have reached out and touched one of the huge rocks.
R-6 beeped a question, and it took a moment for Khedryn to realize its import.
Where was the laser fire? He checked the scanner, but the asteroids clouded the readings so severely that it was hard to know if the Umbaran was still in pursuit. He slowed a bit, wheeled around a large asteroid, dived below a smaller one.
No fire.
“Did we lose him?” he asked aloud.
R-6 beeped uncertainly.
Khedryn dived, spinning, until Junker broke free of the asteroid belt into open space. He pulled up on the stick, ready to dart back into the cover of the field should his scanners pick up the Umbaran’s ship.
They didn’t.
He patted Junker’s instrument panel and allowed himself a relieved breath. He hoped the Umbaran had blown himself up in the asteroid belt, but a scan of the area showed otherwise.
The scout ship was headed fast toward the Rakatan station on the dark side of the planet.
Khedryn cursed—he seemed to do more of that without Marr around—and ordered R-6 to get the transceiver operational as soon as possible. He had to warn Jaden and Marr.
“I’m going aboard the station,” he said to R-6. “They’re going to need help.”
The droid beeped with concern.
Nyss did not appreciate the size of the Rakatan station until they closed with it. It was larger than a star cruiser. It dwarfed the scout ship, and that was only the orbital portion of the station. He maneuvered along the side of the station, right behind the medical supply ship, and, as he had anticipated, a docking appendage extended outward and connected ship to station. More appendages extended underneath the ship, cradling it, holding it steady.
“What is this place?” the Iteration asked.
“This is where you’ll be reborn,” Nyss answered, standing. He gathered his gear: knives, crossbow, quarrels, the mindspears. “Use the Force. Tell me if you sense the Jedi.”
The Iteration closed his gray eyes and concentrated for a moment. He opened them and said, “I don’t, but he could be too far away.”
“Follow me,” Nyss said.
He opened the ship and entered the dark, moist tunnel of the docking tube. The moment he stepped on the warm, slightly giving surface of the station, filaments in the walls and floor began to glow.
“This way,” he said, and headed in the direction of the shaft that connected the orbital station to the larger station built into the planet’s crust. “You’re going to take me to the Prime.”
The Iteration fell in behind him, his lightsaber hilt in his hand.
Jaden imagined that the clones had gone down the tether that connected the station to the planet. Leaving a heap of ancient corpses in their wake, he and Marr headed in that direction. Jaden kept a wary eye open for any more animated remains emerging from side rooms.
There were no doors as such, just thin seams in the wall that parted at their approach. Finned squares in the ceiling might have been vents, or speakers, or both.
“I think this must have been a prison, or maybe a lab,” Marr said. “That’s the only thing that makes sense. It also accounts for all the bodies.”
They moved quickly and quietly through corridors and chambers of no discernible purpose. Whatever equipment had once been in the rooms had been removed long before. Some could have been cells, as Marr speculated, though they might just as easily have been a barracks for ancient soldiers.
Thin lines of light blinked in the walls from time to time, and the touch of their boots on the floor elicited little sunbursts of light around the contact. Jaden had the odd sensation that the station was noting their passage. Static squawked from his comlink, as if the connection to Junker had just been severed. He pinched it to activate it.
“Khedryn, do you copy? Khedryn?”
More static.
Marr tried his comlink and had the same result.
“Could be the walls,” he offered.
“Could be,” Jaden said, and they
kept going.
Dark, rectangular touchpad panels were attached to the wall at intervals. Jaden put a finger on one, and colored patterns of light—but no text—moved across the screen. He did not touch anything more on the pad and it powered down. Here and there they noted small, irregularly shaped apertures in the walls. Hair-thin filaments hung from the edges.
“The technology is unlike anything I’ve seen,” Marr said, reaching out a hand to one of the filaments.
Jaden grabbed his wrist to stop him. The filaments came to life, writhing in response to the proximity of Marr’s hand. The hole twisted partially closed with a wet, mushy sound.
“I think these are some kind of power sockets,” Marr said. “Or a communication port. The filaments are probably the link. They’re laced all through the walls.”
“Let’s keep moving,” Jaden said.
They continued to pick their way through the ancient station until they reached the large, domed, circular chamber that connected to the tether. Seeing it, Marr blew out a whistle.
Holes about a meter in diameter dotted the floor at intervals. Jaden and Marr approached them, looked down, and saw that the holes opened onto shafts that fell away into darkness, presumably descending miles to the surface of the planet below. Damp air redolent with organic decay wafted up the shafts. More of the ancient dead, maybe. An upright touch panel stood beside each hole.
Marr touched one of the control pads and it ignited with light. A beam from the panel shot out at him, flashing over his body.
Jaden moved to shove the Cerean out of the beam, but Marr held up his hands.
“It’s all right,” he said, as the beam bounced across him.
He nodded at the control panel, where a silhouette of his body had appeared on the screen. Orderly flashes of color blinked in the margins of the screen, communicating information Jaden could not understand. When the light show stopped, the shaft at Marr’s feet narrowed a bit, as if sizing itself to fit to his body, and lines of glowing filament lit in its walls, illuminating its downward length for kilometers.
Marr glanced at Jaden, eyebrows raised. “I thought the tether was a lift system of some kind. It appears I was right.”
Jaden eyed the shaft. “Do we just slide in?”
“It looks that way.”
The thought of taking a ride down a kilometers-long mechano-organic shaft into an unknown environment held little appeal for Jaden. But there was nothing else for it, so he touched his hand to the nearest control panel and it scanned his body as the other had done with Marr. The scan felt like a soft breeze on his skin, and when it was done, the shaft at his feet twisted closed a bit to accommodate his form. Lines of glowing filament lit it up. They looked like they went on forever. Jaden assumed the shafts all had to let out at the same place, though he could not be sure.
“If we end up separated, you stay put and I’ll find you,” he said. “Ready?”
Marr nodded, and they each sat at the edge of their respective hole and began to lower themselves into the shaft. The moment Jaden’s legs entered the shaft, the walls bulged out from the sides, took his legs in a warm, gentle grip, and started to pull him in, a sensation that felt disquietingly like being swallowed. He did not resist it.
“Marr,” he called, as the shaft pulled him the rest of the way in. “Are you all right?”
His last word stretched out into a shout of surprise as the bulges holding him in the shaft rippled down its length, taking him with it, descending so fast he might as well have been falling. He gritted his teeth and tried to keep his stomach from rushing up his throat. He was engulfed in the warmth of the walls, the glow of the lines of light.
He fell a long while before the descent began to slow, then finally, to stop. The shaft released its grip on him when he felt firm floor under his boots.
The shaft had deposited him in a large circular chamber, a mirror of the one above, but with tubes descending from the ceiling rather than holes opening in the floor. Control panels for each of the tubes stood at intervals around the room.
The stink of decay, much stronger now, filled the air. His sensation of the dark side felt more concentrated, too. The soft rainfall of power had become a downpour. Jaden tried to filter it out while he nested himself in the Force and reached out with his mind for the clones.
The intense, uncomfortable feedback of contact with a dark-side user pulled at his consciousness. They were not far.
Beside him, the nearest tube bulged like a serpent’s belly and disgorged Marr. The Cerean stood for a moment with his hands on his hips, staring back up the way he’d come.
“Remarkable,” he said, then turned to face Jaden, his head cocked in a question. “Do you feel that? The dark side is …”
“… stronger,” Jaden finished for him.
Marr nodded. “If the station is Rakatan, and is powered in part with dark-side energy, we could be sensing the power center of the station.”
“We’ll soon know,” Jaden said, and led Marr in the direction he’d felt the clones. A vertical seam in the wall slipped wetly open to reveal a corridor beyond. Filaments glowed like veins in the walls.
They walked through, the dark side growing stronger with each step.
Having watched Jaden and Marr in Flotsam, Khedryn knew the Rakatan station would dock with Junker when he got close. He flew the ship in, maneuvered it near and watched in wonder as the station birthed a docking tube and reached out for Junker. Once the ship was settled, Khedryn unstrapped himself from his seat and patted R-6 on the dome.
“Keep the engines hot, little man. And keep working on that transceiver.”
R-6 whistled an affirmative.
Khedryn took a blaster from the cockpit weapons locker and stuffed it into his hip holster. He started to head off, thought better of it, and took a second blaster from the locker and put it in a thigh holster.
“Can’t have too many,” he said to R-6. “Lock the ship down when I’m clear. And contact me immediately when you have the transceiver up.”
Again R-6 whistled an affirmative.
Khedryn hurried to the airlock and opened it. The warm, organic stink of the Rakatan station wafted into the ship, and … something else, something that caused his hair to stand on end.
“Maybe I’m getting sensitive to the dark side,” he muttered, and stepped off Junker.
He barely noticed the filaments that formed a dense, glowing matrix in the walls and floor. Explosions of light ignited under his feet as he ran over the smooth, warm floor. He tried not to think too hard about the technology. The docking tube opened onto a large corridor. He headed right, toward the tether, remembering that Marr had thought it might be a lift of some kind. He tried to raise Jaden and Marr on his comlink as he went, but he received only a blast of static in response. Perhaps the energy of the station further restricted the already limited range in which the comlinks would operate without Junker’s transceiver.
He stopped when he came to a pile of bodies—sentients of all kinds, crushed, dismembered. There was no blood at all, just the remains of ancient, dried-out corpses. A cursory look told him that Jaden and Marr were not among the dead. Probably the bodies had been there for centuries.
“Jaden!” he shouted, and went from a walk, to a jog, to a run. It was a risk to shout—the Umbaran could be near and Khedryn would never spot the stealthy bastard. But he did not care. He had to warn them. “Marr!”
The filaments in the walls responded to his shouts, flaring red and green in answer to his voice. He clutched a blaster in each hand, eyeing every shadow and dark corner suspiciously.
Ahead, he thought a wall blocked his path, but as he approached, a vertical seam in the wall split wetly and opened into another chamber.
“Stang,” he said, and hurried through.
The door squeezed closed behind him. He’d never felt more isolated in his life.
THE MOMENT SOLDIER OPENED THE DOOR, A BLAST OF dark-side energy blew outward in a gust, as if it had been pent
up for centuries. Soldier tucked Grace behind him and leaned into it as he might a strong wind.
“We’re here,” Seer said, quiet awe in her tone.
A large oval chamber stretched out before them, its high ceiling lost in the darkness. Filaments glowed in the walls and floor: white, green, red, and yellow, the lines of color packed so densely that the entire surface seemed aflame. The lines all converged on a cylindrical mound that sat in the center of the chamber. It stood twice as tall as Soldier and expanded and shrank at regular intervals, like a lung. Glowing filaments, these as thick as ropes, coiled around it and sank into the floor. Soldier felt the intelligence in it, and the reality of the situation hit him all at once.
Mother was not a person or thing in the station. Mother was the station. And they were staring at her heart.
“Do you feel her?” Seer said, grinning wildly. “Do you feel her, Soldier?”
Seer’s flesh, her sick, afflicted flesh, pulsed in answer to the heaves of the cylinder. So, too, did Grace’s. Soldier put a protective hand on the girl. He put his other hand on his lightsaber.
Soldier did not feel Mother, but Seer’s ecstatic rush of emotion pushed against his mind, threatening to catch him up in it. He resisted, as much out of habit as will.
Still, he realized that they had made it. After all they had endured, they had made it. Seer had been right. Mother would heal Seer and Grace, would give Soldier purpose. His eyes welled.
“We made it,” he said to Seer.
She looked over at him, smiling, her eyes, too, filled with tears of joy. “We did.”
“Can she … heal us?” he asked.
She touched his cheek, then turned and moved into the chamber. Soldier held his ground with Grace, feeling unworthy to enter.
“What is it, Soldier?” Grace asked.
“It’s Mother,” Soldier answered.
In response to Seer’s approach, the filaments in the walls glowed in organized curtains of red, white, green, and yellow, cascading down the walls and across the floor.
Soldier found them hypnotic.
Grace gasped in wonder. “So pretty.”
Soldier felt Grace’s awe, her wonder, and was pleased he had been able to bring her to Mother. If nothing else, he had done that, and it was of worth.