by James Luceno
His breath formed clouds before his face. His left fist clenched and unclenched reflexively over the void in his palm where his lightsaber should have been.
Without warning, the sky exploded above him with a thunderous boom. A cloud of fire tore through the atmosphere, smearing the sky in smoke and flame. A shriek like stressed metal rolled over Jaden. Ice cracked and groaned on the surface.
Jaden squinted up at the sky, still lit with the after-glow of the destruction, and watched a rain of glowing particulates fall, showering the moon in a hypnotic pattern of falling sparks.
His Force sense perceived them for what they were—the dark side reified. He disengaged his perception too slowly, and the impact of so much evil hit him like a punch in the face. He vomited down the front of his robes, fell to the frozen ground, and balled up on the frozen surface of the moon as the full weight of the dark side coated him in its essence.
There was nowhere to hide, no shelter; it fell all around him, on him, saturated him …
He woke, sweating and light-headed, to the sound of speeder and swoop traffic outside his Coruscant apartment. The thump of his heartbeat rattled the bars of his rib cage. In his mind’s eye, he still saw the shower of falling sparks, the rain of evil. He cleared his throat, and the sensors in the room, detecting his wakefulness, turned on dim room lights.
“Arsix?” he said.
No response. He sat up, alarmed.
“Arsix?”
The sound of shouts and screams outside his window caused him to leap from his bed. With a minor exercise of will, he pulled his primary lightsaber to his hand from the side table near his bed and activated it. The green blade pierced the dimness of his room.
The black ball of Korriban filled Kell’s viewscreen. Clouds seethed in its atmosphere, an angry churn.
He settled Predator, a CloakShape fighter modified with a hyperspace sled and sensor-evading technology copied from a stolen StealthX, into low orbit. The roiling cloak of dark energy that shrouded the planet buffeted Predator, and the ship’s metal creaked in the strain. Kell attuned his vision to Fate and saw the hundreds of daen nosi—fate lines, a Coruscanti academic had once translated the Anzati term—that intersected at Korriban, the planet like a bulbous black spider in a web of glowing potentialities. The past, present, and future lines of the galaxy’s fate passed through the Sith tomb-world’s inhabitants, threads of glowing green, orange, red, and blue that cut it into pieces.
Space–time was pregnant with the possible, and the richness of the soup swelled Kell’s hunger. He had first seen the daen nosi in childhood, after his first kill, and had followed them since. He thought himself unique among the Anzati, special, called, but he could not be certain.
Thinking of his first kill turned his mind to the food he kept in the cargo hold of Predator, but he quelled his body’s impulse with a thought.
His own daen nosi stretched out before him, the veins of his own fate a network of silver lines reaching down through the transparisteel of the cockpit and into the dark swirl, down to the tombs of the Sith, to the secret places where the One Sith lurked. He had business with them, and they with him. The lines of their fates were intertwined.
He punched the coded coordinates of his destination into the navicomp and engaged the autopilot. As Predator began its descent through the black atmosphere, he left the cockpit and went below decks to the cargo hold. He had half a standard hour before he would reach his destination, so he freed his body to feel hunger. Growing anticipation sharpened his appetite.
Five stasis freezers stood against one wall of the hold like coffins. Kell had given them their own clear space in the hold, separated from the equipment and vehicles that otherwise cluttered the compartment. A humanoid slept in stasis in each freezer, three humans and two Rodians. He examined the freezers’ readouts, checking vital signs. All remained in good health.
Staring at their still features, Kell wondered what happened behind their closed eyes, in the quiet of their dreams. He imagined the zest of their soup and hunger squirmed in his gut. None were so-called Force-sensitives, who had the richest soup, but they would suffice.
He glided from one freezer to the next, brushing his fingertips on the cool glass that separated him from his prey. His captives’ daen nosi extended from their freezers to him, his to them. He stopped before the middle-aged human male he had taken on Corellia.
“You,” he said, and watched his silver lines intertwine with the green lines of the Corellian.
He activated the freezer’s thaw cycle. The hiss of escaping gas screamed the human’s end. Kell watched as the freezer’s readout indicated a rising temperature, watched as color returned to the human’s flesh. His hunger grew, and the feeders nesting in the sacs of his cheeks twitched. He needed his prey conscious, otherwise he could not transcend.
He reached through the daen nosi that connected him to his meal.
Awaken, he softly projected.
The human’s eyes snapped open, pupils dilated, lids wide. Fear traveled through the mental connection and Kell savored it. The freezer’s readout showed a spiking heart rate, increasing respiration. The human opened his mouth to speak but his motor functions, still sluggish from stasis, could produce only a muffled, groggy croak.
Kell pressed the release button, and the freezer’s cover slid open. Be calm, he projected, and his command wormed its way into the human’s mind, a prophylactic for the fear.
But growing terror overpowered Kell’s casual psychic hold. The human struggled against his mental bonds, finally found his voice.
“Please. I have done nothing.”
Kell leaned forward, took the human’s doughy face in his hands. The human shook his head but was no match for Kell’s strength.
“Please,” the Corellian said. “Why are you doing this? Who are you? What are you?”
Kell watched all of the human’s daen nosi, all of his potential futures, coalesce into a single green line that intersected Kell’s silver one, where it … stopped.
“I am a ghost,” Kell answered, and opened the slits in his face. His feeders squirmed free of their sacs, wirethin appendages that fed on the soup of the sentient.
The human screamed, struggled, but Kell held him fast.
Be calm, Kell projected again, this time with force, and the human fell silent.
The feeders wormed their way into the warm, moist tunnels of the Corellian’s nostrils, and rooted upward. Anticipation caused Kell to drool. He stared into the human’s wide, bloodshot eyes as the feeders penetrated tissue, pierced membranes, entered the skull cavity, and sank into the rich gray stew in the human’s skull. A spasm racked the human’s body. Tears pooled in his wide eyes and fell, glistening, down his cheeks. Blood dripped in thin lines from his nose.
Kell grunted with satisfaction as he devoured potential futures, as the human’s lines ended and Kell’s continued. Kell’s eyes rolled back in his head as his daen nosi lengthened and he temporarily became one with the soup of Fate. His consciousness deepened, expanded to the size of the galaxy, and he mentally sampled its potential. Time compressed. The arrangement of daen nosi across the universe looked less chaotic. He saw a hint of order. Revelation seemed just at the edge of his understanding, and he experienced a tingling shudder with each beat of his hearts.
Show me, he thought. Let me see.
The moment passed as the human expired and Kell let him drop to the floor of the bay.
Revelation retreated and he backed away from the corpse, gasping. He came back to himself, mere flesh, mere limited comprehension.
He looked down at the cooling body at his feet, understanding that only in murder did he transcend.
He retracted his feeders, slick with blood, mucus, and brains, and they sat quiescent in their sacs.
Sighing, he collected the human’s corpse, bore it to the air lock, and set the controls to eject it. Through the centuries, he had left such litter on hundreds of planets.
As he watched the auto
mated ejection sequence vacate the air lock, he consoled himself with the knowledge that one day he would feed on stronger soup that would reveal to him the whole truth of Fate.
Reasonably sated, he returned to the cockpit of Predator and linked his comm receiver to the navicomp, as he had been instructed. In moments the autopilot indicator winked out—reminding Kell of the way the Corellian’s eyes had winked out, how the human had transformed from sentience to meat in the span of a moment—and another force took control of Predator. Kell settled into his chair as the ship sped through the malaise of Korriban’s atmosphere toward the dark side of the planet.
A short time later Predator set down in the midst of ancient structures. Lightning illuminated weathered pyramids, towers of pitted stone, crystalline domes, all of them the temples and tombs of the Sith, all of them the geometry of the dark side. Black clouds roiled and jagged runs of lightning formed a glowing net in the sky.
Kell rose, slid into his mimetic suit, checked the twin cortosis-coated vibroblades sheathed at his belt, and headed for Predator’s landing ramp. Before lowering it, he took a blaster and holster from a small-arms locker and strapped them to his thigh. He considered blasters inelegant weapons, but preferred to be overarmed rather than under.
He pressed the release button on the ramp. Hydraulics hummed and the door lowered. Wind and rain hissed into Predator. Korriban’s air, pungent with the reek of past ages, filled his nostrils. Thunder boomed.
Kell stared out into the darkness, noted the clustered pinpoints of red light that floated in the pitch. He shifted on his feet as the lights drew closer—a silver protocol droid. He attuned his vision to Fate, saw no daen nosi. Droids were programming, nothing more. They made no real choices and so had no lines. The false sentience of the droid unnerved Kell and he cut off the perception.
The anthropomorphic droid strode through the wind and rain to the base of the landing ramp and bowed its head in a hum of servos.
“Master Anzat,” the droid said in Basic. “I am Deefourfive. Please follow me. The Master awaits you.”
The droid’s words rooted Kell to the deck. Despite himself, Kell’s twin hearts doubled their beating rate. Adrenaline flowed into his blood. The feeders in his cheeks spasmed. He inhaled, focused for a moment, and returned his body to calmness, his hormone level to normal.
“The Master? Krayt himself?”
“Please follow,” the droid said, turned, and began walking.
Kell pulled up the hood of his suit but did not lower the mask; he strode down the ramp and stepped into the storm. Korriban drenched him. With a minor effort of will, he adjusted his core body temperature to compensate for the chill.
The droid led him along long-dead avenues lined with the ancient stone and steel monuments of the Sith Order. Kell saw no duracrete, no transparisteel, nothing modern. On much of Korriban, he knew, new layers had been built on the old over the millennia, creating a kind of archaeological stratification of the Sith ages.
Not here. Here, the most ancient of Sith tombs and temples sat undisturbed. Here, Krayt wandered in his dreams of conquest.
A flash of lightning veined the sky, painting shadows across the necropolis. Kell’s mimetic suit adjusted to account for the temporary change in lighting. As he walked, he felt a growing regard fix on him, a consciousness.
Ahead, he saw a squat tower of aged stone—Krayt’s sanctuary. Spirals of dark energy swirled in languid arcs around the spire. Only a few windows marred its otherwise featureless exterior, black holes that opened into a dark interior. To Kell, they looked like screaming mouths protesting the events transpiring within.
The droid ascended a wide, tiered stairway that led to a pair of iron doors at the base of the spire. Age-corroded writing and scrollwork spiraled over the door’s surface. Kell could not read it.
“Remain here, please,” the droid said, and vanished behind the doors.
Kell waited under Korriban’s angry sky, surrounded by the tombs of Korriban’s dead Sith Lords. Checking his wrist chrono from time to time, he attuned his senses to his surroundings and waited on Krayt’s pleasure.
Footsteps sounded behind him, barely audible above the rain. He changed his perception as he turned, and saw a thick network of daen nosi that extended through the present to the future, wrapping the galaxy like a great serpent that would strangle it.
THE PAST:
5,000 YEARS BEFORE THE BATTLE OF YAVIN
Relin and Drev sat in pensive silence as their Infiltrator streaked through the churning blue tunnel of hyperspace. They watched their instrumentation intently, hoping for the telltale beep denoting detection of the hyperspace beacon secreted aboard Harbinger. Lingering silence would mean they’d lost Saes.
“Scanners functioning normally,” Drev said. After a sidelong glance at Relin, he began to hum, a free-form, lively tune from his homeworld.
“Must you?” Relin asked, smiling despite himself as he adjusted the instrumentation.
“Yes,” said Drev, also smiling, but without looking up from his instruments. “I must.”
Relin admired his Padawan’s ability to find joy in everything he did, though Relin thought—and taught—that it was more important to maintain emotional evenness. Extremes of emotion could lead to the dark side.
Still, he wondered sometimes if Drev was the only one doing the learning in their relationship. It seemed Relin smiled only when in Drev’s presence. Saes’s betrayal had cut the mirth out of him as skillfully as a surgeon.
Drev tapped the scanner screen with a thick finger. “Come out, come out, whither you hide.”
Presently, the scanner picked up a faint signal. Relin and Drev exhaled as one and leaned forward in their seats.
Drev chuckled and put a finger on the scanner screen. “There. They did it.”
Relin let the navicomp digest the scanner’s input and cross-referenced the coordinates. “The Phaegon system.”
Without waiting for instruction, Drev pulled up the onboard computer’s information on the system.
“There’s nothing there,” Drev said, eyeing the readout. “What is he doing?”
“Still looking, maybe,” Relin said, and took the controls. “We will know soon enough.”
The signal grew in strength as the Infiltrator hurtled through hyperspace.
“He’s deep in-system,” Relin said. “We emerge ten light-seconds out.”
Drev nodded and input the commands into the navicomp. “The system has four planets, each with multiple moons. An asteroid belt divides the third from the fourth.”
“Use it as cover until we understand what Saes is doing.”
“Deactivating the hyperdrive in five, four …”
“Activating signature scrambler and baffles,” Relin said. At the same moment, he used the Force to mask his and Drev’s Force signatures, lest Saes perceive their arrival.
“… two, one,” Drev said, and deactivated the hyperdrive.
The blue tunnel of hyperspace gave way to the black void of stars, planets, and asteroids.
Instantly a wave of dark side energy, raw and jagged, saturated the ship. Unready for the assault, Relin lost his breath, turned dizzy. Drev groaned, lurched back in his seat as if struck, then vomited down the front of his robes.
“Where is that coming from?” Relin said between gritted teeth.
Drev shook his head, still heaving. He reached for the scanner console.
“Leave it,” Relin said, and adjusted the scanners himself.
They showed nothing nearby but the spinning chaos of the asteroid belt, and Phaegon III and its many moons.
Relin took a moment to clear his head, then drew on the Force to shield them from the ambient dark side energy. With his defenses in place, he felt the energy as only a soft, unpleasant pressure in his mind, incessant raindrops thumping against his skull, but it no longer affected his senses.
“All right?” he asked Drev.
Drev cleared his throat, eyed his flight suit and robes in e
mbarrassment. “I am all right. Apologies, Master.”
Relin waved away the apology. He had been unprepared, too.
“My meal tasted better the first time,” Drev said, smiling, his cheeks bright red.
“Smelled better, too,” Relin said, chuckling as he pored over the scanner’s output.
“So, it’s vomit that looses your sense of humor,” Drev said. He stripped off his robe, balled it up, and retook his seat. He took a gulp of a flavored protein drink in a plastic pouch, swished it around his mouth. “I will keep that in mind. Maybe scatological humor will amuse you also?”
Relin only half smiled. His mind was on their situation. What had they stumbled onto? He had never before experienced such a wash of pure dark side energy. Whatever Saes had been searching for, he must have found it in the Phaegon system. Drev must have sensed his seriousness.
“What do you make of it?” Drev asked. “A dark side weapon? A Sith artifact maybe?”
Relin shook his head. The energy was not intense, simply widespread. “We will soon know.”
He engaged the ion drive and started to take them into the asteroid belt, but thought better of it. He took his hands from the controls.
“Take us in, Drev,” he said.
He felt his Padawan’s eyes on him. “Into the belt?”
Relin nodded. The Infiltrator’s sensor scrambler and the churn of the asteroid belt would foil any Sith scanners.
“Are you certain, Master?”
“Still your mind,” he said to his Padawan. “Feel the Force, trust it.”
Drev was one of the best raw pilots in the Order. With time and training in the use of the Force, he would become one of the Jedi’s finest.
“Take us in,” Relin repeated.
Drev stared out of the cockpit, at the ocean of whirling rocks. He paused for a long, calming breath, then took the controls and piloted the Infiltrator into the asteroid belt.
He accelerated without hesitation and the ship darted through the field of slowly spinning rock, diving, ascending, rolling. Pitted stones flashed on the viewscreen for a moment, vanished as Drev cruised under them, over them, around them. One of the Infiltrator’s wings caught an oblong asteroid and the ship lurched, started to spin.