signals. A plague, spreading like wildfire with a hundred percent mortality
rate. Zekk shuddered. A disease so horrible it killed everyone... and he had
almost opened the Lightning Rod and breathed in the air!
Zekk went to a supply locker and found an intact environment suit.
The Lightning Rod's decontamination systems were still operating
efficiently--or at least he hoped so. Peckhum had never known when he might need
to sterilize a cargo for transport from one planet to another.
Zekk suited up, tied back his long dark hair, and double-checked the seals
on his gloves, on his boots, and around his helmet lock. He took more care than
he would have had he been about to step into hard vacuum. Indeed, the creeping
plague might well be an even more unpleasant death than the vacuum' of space.
Once he stepped outside the ship he could feel the wind rippling gentle
fingers across the fabric of his suit. His breathing echoed in his ears,
reflecting back inside the helmet so that it sounded as if he were
hyperventilating. When he switched on the suit's external voice pickup, he heard
only a sighing breeze, like the panting of a grieving parent too exhausted to
cry any longer. He heard the hissing of sand and dust being blown around, the
groaning of empty buildings, settling houses. But he heard no signs of life.
Nothing at all.
He walked along the street. The buildings around him were tall, their
windows like blind eyes. He found cadavers sprawled on the street, smothered by
drifts of dust.
He stood close to one and nudged the sand away with his thick boot,
exposing a shriveled, dessicated arm. The skin had turned grayish, peppered with
strikingly vivid blotches of blue and green.
He could not bear to uncover the dead man's face, though. Yes, this must be
a plague, all fight. A terrible plague. As bad as the Death Seed sickness that
had struck down so many people years before.
He walked down the street, leaving footprints that were gradually erased by
the shifting dust. All around him the dead city seemed eerie, oppressive. He
switched on his loudspeaker, turned up the volume, and shouted into the numb
air: "Hello! Is anyone alive? Can anyone hear me?"
He listened intently, trying to discern any rustle of movement some weak
survivor crawling to a doorway, hands outstretched for help.
Instead, Zekk heard only the echoes of his own words bouncing upward off
the abandoned buildings until they were swallowed in the dust-laden sky.
He trudged on down the street, feeling dread. He realized he would never
find Fonterrat here... at least not alive. And what good would it do him to find
the scavenger dead? He did not want to go inside the darkened buildings, which
were little more than decaying tombs.
Then, through a gap in the buildings leading to a broad courtyard beyond,
he saw a glint of metal not yet covered with dust--a ship!
Apparently it had landed not long ago.
As he stopped, he recognized the vessel's configuration, the odd elongated
form and ovoid main body. He had seen that vessel among the shards of Alderaan
and chased it through the asteroid field, but it had eluded him in the forest of
rocks.
Slave IV!
Feeling a sudden sharp tingle of warning, Zekk whirled in his bulky suit
and stumbled to one side just as a blaster bolt struck the ground at his feet,
fusing the sand into a lump of molten glass.
Unable to run in his unwieldy suit, he staggered against a railing outside
one of the prefab buildings and saw the helmeted form of Boba Fett stride out
from a sheltered doorway.
The bounty hunter pointed his heavy blaster directly at Zekk.
Zekk had a weapon attached to his suit, but he would never be able to draw
it in time... and he doubted he could shoot faster or more accurately than the
fearsome mercenary Boba Fett.
Slowly, he raised both of his gloved hands in surrender. His thoughts
whirled as he tried to figure out a way to escape this situation. If Boba Fett
recognized Zekk as the one who had shot at him in the asteroid field of
Alderaan,' the bounty hunter might take great pleasure in eliminating him just
for revenge.
"I had thought no one remained alive on this world," Boba Fett said in a
rough voice filtered through the speaker in his sealed Mandalorian helmet. "But
I see I was wrong.
And now you are my captive."
"AH. KUAR, FIFTH planet orbiting a single sun in a star system of the same
name," Tenel Ka said, reading from her datapad while sitting in one of the crew
seats of the Hapan passenger cruiser.
"Still capable of sustaining human life, but apparently abandoned for some
time..."
"Does it say anything about particular cities or structures?"
Jaina asked, craning her neck to look out the Rock Dragoh's cockpit
windowport, peering down toward the unwelcoming landscape below.
"Unfortunately, no," Tenel Ka said, consulting the datapad again.
Lowbacca rumbled a question about the level of technology that might remain
on the planet.
"No data on the technology of Kuar's inhabitants either. In fact," Tenel Ka
said, holding up a finger to forestall the question Jacen was about to ask,.
"other than the legends of the Mandalorian warriors, I have found nothing about
the former inhabitants."
Jacen's face fell, then he brightened again.
"What about wildlife? Interesting animal species or plants?"
Tenel Ka shook her head grimly. "These files contain minimal data. Little
that is of any use to us--only the ramblings of historical scholars speculating
about the original inhabitants, before the Mandalorians swept through. None of
the data is current.
Even planetary archaeologists do not place this site on their priority
research lists."
"Hey, Em Teedee, do you have any other information about Kuar?"
Jacen asked.
"Dear me, I'm afraid to say there's not much,. really, aside from what
Mistress Tenel Ka has already told you. And I have the coordinates, of course."
The little droid made a sound like an aggrieved sigh. "I imagine that's not very
useful at this point, is it? We're already here."
"We'll be able to speculate all we want about Kuar in a couple of minutes,"
Jaina said. "We're almost to the atmosphere. Okay, hit it, Lowie."
The young Wookiee flicked a few switches, and the ship nosed down toward
the vast sky that spread its thin blanket over the curved surface of Kuar.
Jaina flashed a conspiratorial grin at her brother and Tenel Ka.
"As I always say, show me--don't tell me."
Tenel Ka raised an eyebrow and turned to Jacen. "Does she always say that?
I have not heard her say it before."
Jacen merely shrugged. The Rock Dragon dove into the atmosphere.
The magnified views of the distant landscape below alternated between
occasional rock formations and various colors of dust Or sand.
It seemed as if the dusts of time had sifted over the entire world.
But excitement had overtaken Jacen, and he was impatient to know more about
the mysterious place beneath them. "Hey, what do the readings say?" he
asked.
"Life-forms," Jaina answered succinctly.
"Quite a few, in fact. Definitely non-human--at least the life-forms we're
picking up right now."
Lowie gave a thoughtful purr. "Quite right, Master Lowbacca," Em Teedee
said.
"There's no telling yet whether the life-forms are sentient or not."
A few thin clouds drifted high in the atmosphere like worn and tattered
lace, but they did little to obstruct Jacen's view through the windowport. From
this height, the surface seemed relatively flat and featureless.
"What about buildings?" he asked.
Lowie studied the readouts again and woofed a few times. "Most assuredly,
Master Lowbacca. 'Those are definitely not natural formations," Em Teedee said.
'Td hardly call them buildings, however.
The structures are certainly old, but there's something odd about them--
irregular, as if they're only half there."
"Ruins, perhaps?" Tenel Ka suggested.
"Quite probably," Em Teedee agreed.
"Why don't we just get closer and see?"
Jacen asked impatiently. "That's the best way to find out."
Jaina sighed. "I purposely stayed high, in hopes that we'd spot a city or
smugglers encampment, or pick up a beacon of some sort to show us where any
inhabited areas might be. I thought it would be the easiest way to figure out
where Bornan Thul might have gone. You're right, though--we21 have to go down
closer."
Jacen grinned at her, raising his eyebrows.
"Well, what are you waiting for?"
She took the Rock Dragon lower until they were skimming just two hundred
meters above the surface. In most areas, the vegetation was fairly sparse. Rocky
spikes and pillars and mesas jutted up from the landscape.
Occasionally, Jacen saw what looked like a nest of Some sort on one of the
outcroppings. The color of the dirt, sand, and rock varied from cream, to
saffron, to gray, to pale blue with purplish striations, to bright ochre, to
stark obsidian.
Lowie 'woofed and tapped the control panel in front of him.
"Yep, I see it," Jaina said.
"What kind of structures?" Jacen asked.
"I'm afraid I can't say," Em Teedee replied.
"They are approximately three kilometers ahead of us. At least that's what
the ship's sensors indicate."
"There," Jaina said as she slowed the Rock Dragon and dropped even lower.
The thick wall that surrounded the small city atop a high, strategic hill was
broken in several places. Some of the buildings inside the enclosure seemed in
good repair, but others were cracked and crumbling. A variety of furred and
feathered creatures bounded, scurried, or swooped from building to building.
Yellow, six-legged reptiles with curly tails clung to the sunny side of every
wall or turret.
"No people," Tenel Ka observed.
"Somebody must live on this planet.
Maybe they just don't like this city for some reason," Jacen said.
"The others might still be inhabited, though." He wished they could stop to
explore, so he could study the strange creatures he had just seen, but Jaina
pulled the Rock Dragon up and had already begun looking for the next city.
They flew for hours across the surface of the planet, zigzagging back and
forth to cover more ground. They came upon a score of other ghost cities,
fortresses, and villages in varying states of disrepair.
None were inhabited, and none had been disturbed in centuries.
Civilization on Kuar had died out long ago, and it seemed that no new
settlers had taken up residence here.
They found no dues to Bornan Thul's whereabouts, no evidence to show he or
anyone else, had been here.
Jacen was beginning to get nervous. He could see Jaina biting her lower
lip. "Where are people when you need them?" he heard her mutter.
"You, um... you don't suppose," Jacen began, "that some war or virus or
something could have killed everybody on Kuar, do you?"
Jaina darted him a startled look, as if she had not thought of this.
"No," Tenel Ka said simply. "The Man-dalorians used the planet briefly
after they conquered it. Then they abandoned this place."
"Rest assured, Master Jacen," Em Teedee chimed in, "all evidence indicates
that the settlements we're seeing have been deserted for hundreds if not
thousands--of years."
Jacen relaxed slightly. "Okay, there aren't any people. Then what exactly
are we looking for, anyway?"
"No people, no beacons.... "Jaina mused. "Where would strangers plan to
meet? A landmark maybe?" Jaina said.
"There is much surface area to cover," Tenel Ka pointed out.
"It would have to be an obvious meeting place, then," Jaina said.
"Something that's easy to find on a planet this size."
Lowie rumbled that the meeting place would need a good landing area nearby.
"Okay, that's what we're looking for, then."
Jaina nodded. "Trust me, I'll know it when I see it."
Jacen, Lowie, and Tenel Ka exchanged amused glances.
As it turned out, Jaina was right. Just before dawn she saw a broad-based
mesa that rose a kilometer above the cracked and dusty plain. As they drew
closer, it became clear that the plateau, which was close to three kilometers
wide, was not really a mesa. The majority of the mountain's flat top had
collapsed into a deep crater, surrounded by an artificially broad, level rim,
forming a gigantic natural arena.
Houses and tunnels and walkways and stairs had long ago been built into the
interior sides of the crater. From the floor of the crater rose the ruins of a
vast array of tall, crumbling buildings. A network of rusty chains connected the
tops of these structures, like the web design of some deranged insect. Jaina
brought the Rock Dragon in for a smooth landing on the broad lip of the crater.
"Here we are," she said smugly. "Landmark.
Easy to spot. Excellent landing area.
This would be my guess." Lowie agreed enthusiastically.
"Our sensors indicate no signs of airborne contaminants that would endanger
the lives of humans or Wookiees," Em Teedee assured them.
"The atmosphere is perfectly breathable."
"Everybody out, then," Jaina said. "Time to stretch our legs."
"Great," Jacen sighed, unbuckling his crash webbing. He was already
thinking about what kinds of unusual creatures they might encounter, hoping he
would find some of the interesting specimens he had seen from the air.
"Now the next stage of our search begins," Tenel Ka said. "The real work."
She followed Jacen down the shuttle's exit ramp, breathing deeply of the dry
air. Jaina and Lowie tumbled after them, eager to move about after their long
journey.
Jacen ran to the edge of the deep crater and looked down at the patchwork
of ancient buildings, chains, and walls dappled by shadows.
"It could take a long time to search all that," he said. "It's a whole
city."
Lowie gave a negative growl. "Lowie's right. I think it would be more
logical to start up here," Jaina said. "The best place to set down a ship would
be somewhere along this'rim," she made a sweeping gesture with one arm to
indicate the wide ledge that
encircled the crater, "rather than down there."
After a brief consultation, the young Jedi Knights spread out from the
rocky edge and spaced themselves to cover the greatest area. They walked slowly
around the rim, scanning the ground ahead and to each side for any sign of a
recent disturbance in the ancient settled dust.
After several false alarms--which turned out to be nothing more than a
gouge out of the rock, a shiny feather, or some animal droppings--Jacen, who was
closest to the outer rim, saw something flutter up ahead.
Shading his eyes with one hand against the direct glare of the early
morning sun, he ran forward, certain in his heart that he had discovered
something important. To his great disappointment, though, he found nothing more
than a flat gray slab of rock, as large as one of the serving trays back at the
Jedi academy.
His sister, Lowie, and Tenel Ka dashed up beside him.
"What is it?" Jaina asked.
"Nothing, I guess," Jacen said. "I thought I saw something colorful moving
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