The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  But Jaden needed to feel the air, taste it. He deactivated the seal on his helmet, and it disconnected with a slight hiss.

  Khedryn took him by the arm. “What are you doing?”

  “I need to do this, Khedryn.”

  “Why?”

  Jaden did not answer, but Khedryn let him go, muttering about eyes and cursing randomly.

  Jaden lifted off the helmet and gasped at the smell of the air, the cut of the wind against his skin. He was living his Force vision, the imagined and the real melding into one in the frozen air of the moon.

  He inhaled. The air felt like fire in his throat and he imagined himself purged by the pain. Moisture from his breath formed clouds in the air before him, collected in his beard, froze there. The wind hissed past his ears. In the distance, he heard the crack of ice.

  All of it as it had been in his vision.

  He knelt, removed a glove, and took a handful of snow from the deck, letting it melt in his hand. He looked out through the swirl and saw the red light of the communications tower looming over the rest of the complex, blinking at him through the snow.

  Help us. Help us.

  He would.

  Standing, he slid his glove back over his freezing hand, resealed his helmet, then activated his lightsaber. The heat it threw off warmed him.

  “Follow me,” he said to Khedryn.

  Khedryn drew his blaster and followed him toward the facility. “I am increasingly concerned that all Jedi are crazed.”

  Jaden smiled but otherwise left the comment alone. Khedryn tapped a control pad on his suit’s forearm and remotely closed and secured the Starhawk.

  The deep snow clutched at their feet, as if trying to slow their advance and give them time to reconsider. Jaden looked up, eyed the slate of the sky, imagined not snow falling but reified evil.

  “Do you think they’re all right?” Khedryn said over the comlink, apparently misunderstanding his look. “Would you know if … something happened?”

  “The Force is with them,” Jaden said.

  “You said that before, but it’s not an answer.”

  “I do not have many of those.”

  The facility looked to Jaden not like an ordinary building, but like a tomb that held an enormous evil better left alone. He was unsure that he should dig it up, yet he felt he had no choice. He faltered in his steps.

  Khedryn stepped to his side. “Come on, Jaden. Keep moving. There is a hatch ahead.”

  Jaden continued on, walking beside a skew-eyed salvager on a moon not found on any star charts.

  “Hey, was I in your vision?” Khedryn asked him.

  “No.”

  “That’s not reassuring,” Khedryn said, and chuckled.

  Jaden laughed, too, glad once more for Khedryn’s presence.

  They neared the hatch, and Jaden was certain that whatever fate the Force had for him lurked behind it.

  Marr held a blaster in one hand and with his other the steering bars of Khedryn’s Searing swoop. The swoop’s motor was so loud it sounded like an ongoing explosion.

  Marr’s heart beat so fast he could hardly breathe. Recalling Relin’s words, he turned inward, focused his mind on the keep within him, thought of how he felt when immersed in a difficult calculation, a distant, warm isolation that brought him calm.

  His heart and breathing slowed, replaced by a pleasing serenity.

  Centered, resolved, he revved the swoop’s engine and bolted out of the cargo bay into the corridor, firing his blaster as fast as he could pull the trigger, hoping the Force would guide some of his shots.

  Blasterfire from Harbinger’s security forces answered his own, sizzled past his ears, and thumped into the swoop. It bucked under him like an angry bantha, but he held his seat. He picked a spot in the hall—where the two humanoids sheltered behind the loading droid—ducked low behind the windscreen and, still firing his blaster wildly, flew right at them.

  Jaden expected to find the hatch rusted shut, or protected by a security system. Instead they found it propped open a few centimeters. Khedryn and he stared at the hatch for a long moment, the wind howling past their helmets.

  “What do you make of that?” Khedryn asked, nodding at the item holding the door open.

  Jaden knelt and picked it up—the back hand plate from a suit of Imperial stormtrooper armor.

  “Is that from a stormie suit?”

  Jaden nodded, turning the plastoid plate over in his hand. “It is. Odd.”

  “Probably been there for decades,” Khedryn said, but he did not sound as if he believed it. He looked over his shoulder as if he expected a squad of the 501st to come charging out of the snow.

  “Probably,” Jaden agreed. On edge, he pulled the heavy metal door open the rest of the way. It opened onto a small foyer. A transparisteel observation window on an inner wall opened onto a guard station. Another hatch, thrown open, revealed a hallway that led deeper into the facility. Over the hatch, written in Basic in stenciled letters, were the words:

  WEST ENTRY. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

  Jaden reached out with the Force, seeking any Force-sensitives within range, but felt none.

  “Follow me,” he said, leading Khedryn past the post and through the hatch, his lightsaber a torch in the otherwise dark corridor. Khedryn activated a glow rod and added its light to the weapon’s glow.

  Walking those metal-floored, abandoned halls, Jaden felt as if he had stepped into the past as surely as Relin had stepped into the future.

  “Ten degrees Celsius,” Khedryn said, taking the information from his suit readout. He unsealed his helmet, letting it hang from its connectors down his back. “Someone is keeping the place warm.”

  Jaden unsealed his own helmet, his breath steaming in the air. They walked on, their feet moving through the detritus of a rapid retreat: scrap electronics; flimsiplast, the ink long faded; stray data crystals; oddly, a hairbrush.

  Khedryn cleared his throat, a nervous sound. “What do you suppose happened here?”

  Jaden shook his head.

  They moved through hall after hall, room after room, and everywhere it was the same—debris littered the floor in the silent, cool air. They found nothing to indicate the facility’s purpose.

  In time they came to a series of small, sparely furnished personal quarters where clothing still hung in closets, where beds remained unmade. The whole facility felt to Jaden like a doll’s house in which a child had lost interest and just left off in midplay.

  He examined the clothing and shoes in the closets. In addition to ordinary clothing, he found a neatly pressed Imperial uniform and several lab coats. The label sewn onto the coat’s breast read DR. BLACK.

  “Thrawn-era uniform,” Jaden said, noting the cut of the cuffs, the rank insignia. “Imperial Medical Corps.”

  “Medical corps?” Khedryn said, his breathing a bit too rapid. “A bioweapons research lab, you think? I did not think to scan for an aerosolized bioweapon.”

  “You had no reason to,” Jaden said. “And what’s done is done. If there were something in the air, we’d be suffering effects already. I feel fine. You?”

  “Fine.”

  “Then I think we’re all right.”

  “Maybe we should put our helmets back on.”

  “We’re all right.”

  Khedryn seemed to accept that, and the two of them searched the chest of drawers, the side table. Jaden felt awkward pawing through another’s personal effects, but saw no other choice. He rifled through toiletries, a reading light, a gift set of novels on data crystals inset into an elaborate box. Eventually Khedryn pulled a personal vidlog from the back of one of the drawers.

  “Here,” he said in an excited tone. He tapped at the buttons, soft at first, then harder. “Not functional. With some time Marr could probably recover the data.”

  “Leave it,” Jaden said. He started to move on when something struck him and halted him in his steps. He looked around the room to confirm his thought, then spoke it al
oud.

  “There are no pictures.”

  “No what?”

  “No pictures, no holograms, no vids. Of friends, family. Look around.”

  Khedryn turned a circle, his eyes askew. “You’re right. Maybe they took them with them?”

  “Maybe,” Jaden said, but thought not. They seemed to have left in a hurry, abandoning all manner of personal effects. They would have left at least some pictures or holograms.

  “Let’s keep moving,” Jaden said.

  They soon came upon a recreation room where two card games and a match of sonic billiards appeared to have ended abruptly. Khedryn examined the cards at one of the tables.

  “Sabacc,” he said, and flipped over the cards for all but one of the hands. “Cheap deck and not a good hand among them. Unlucky bunch.” He seemed to hear his words only after he said them and colored at their implication. “At cards, I mean.”

  A galley off the recreation room still had sludgy caf in two of the pots, stores of dry goods, fresh food long rotted. Jaden eyed the walls and saw a large square speaker beside one of the air filtration vents. He imagined an alert blaring out of it, everyone leaving what they were doing to respond, but ultimately fleeing the facility in a hurry.

  Assuming they had gotten out. He was no longer so sure.

  “What is this place?” Khedryn said, his outstretched arms taking in the whole of the complex. “Have you noticed that there’s nothing to indicate what it is? Nothing. But Imperials used to put labels on everything. Normally the hallway walls would be crowded with written directions and arrows pointing to weapons lab this, research area that. This place is secret even from itself.”

  Jaden agreed. Something about the facility felt off. Too secret.

  “There has to be a central computing core,” Jaden said. “Let’s find it.”

  Continuing through the corridors, they found still more sleeping quarters for laboratory personnel. The lab coats again had names sewn onto the breasts. After seeing a few more the pattern became clear—DR. BROWN, DR. RED, DR. GREEN, DR. GRAY.

  “What the kark?” Khedryn asked, holding up another lab coat to read the name—DR. BLUE.

  A picture started to develop in Jaden’s mind. “None of them knew the real names of the others. That’s why there are no pictures or holograms in their quarters. Nothing personal, nothing with which one could later identify another.”

  Jaden knew that at some top-secret Thrawn-era facilities the participating scientists would be forced to endure surgical alterations of their facial structure while on assignment, changing back to themselves only after their work was completed. None would be able to recognize another afterward. He wondered if that had happened in the facility, and if so, why.

  “And no instructions on the walls,” Khedryn said. “Visitors knew nothing. Probably the doctors had the facilities map imprinted into their memory.” He licked his lips nervously and stared at Jaden for a long moment, even his lazy eye fixed straight ahead. “I think we should leave, Jaden. There is something wrong here.”

  Jaden agreed, but he could not leave, not yet. “I cannot, Khedryn. But you are not obliged to remain.”

  Jaden saw shame and resolve battle in Khedryn’s expression. His fingers opened and closed reflexively over the handle of his blaster. His lazy eye floated off for a time before returning to fix on Jaden’s face.

  “I said I was with you and I’m with you. Blast it, if Marr can fly into Harbinger with Relin, I can walk some abandoned halls with you.”

  “Thank you,” Jaden said, moved by Khedryn’s loyalty.

  “What do you think they were working on here?”

  “Something high priority. Top secret.”

  “Something dangerous.”

  “Yes.”

  They continued on, caution slowing their progress. Eventually they passed through a large botanical garden where cold-stiffened, time-browned vegetables and flowers sagged in their pots like desiccated corpses. Sun-lamps hung from the ceiling, eyeballing the death of their charges. The faint smell of soil and organic decay filled the cavernous garden.

  They walked through, trying not to smell the death, seeking the central computing core. They passed what Jaden figured to be a barracks: wall-mounted double racks, military-issue blankets, a central table for recreation. Bits of stormtrooper armor lay strewn about here and there. None of the armor exhibited unit identifications. Jaden imagined the troopers had been elite soldiers plucked from various units to serve as security in the facility. They would have been mindwiped after leaving the facility, he imagined.

  A weapons locker adjacent to the barracks had only empty racks save for a lonely BlasTech E-11 on one of the rungs, a heavy blaster commonly used by stormtroopers. Jaden and Khedryn left it alone.

  They passed through more corridors, more rooms, but Jaden barely saw them. He wanted to reach the central computing core. He would find an answer there, if anywhere, to the question of the facility’s purpose.

  “Look at this,” Khedryn said, nodding at the walls.

  Jaden came back to himself and saw what had caught Khedryn’s eye. Scorch marks on the walls, lots of them, even a few on the ceiling. Khedryn ran his gloved fingers over them.

  “Blasterfire,” Jaden said.

  “Looks like quite a battle,” Khedryn said. He turned about, examining the walls, floor, ceiling. There were marks everwhere. “Some wild shots taken here. Desperation fire.”

  “Yes,” Jaden said. “Let’s keep moving.”

  The signs of a pitched battle grew more pronounced as they continued deeper into the complex. More scorch marks from blasters, entire suits of stormtrooper armor cast in pieces across the floor with holes in the chest or helmets.

  “No bodies,” Khedryn said, toeing an empty breastplate. “Pieces look scattered, as if by an animal.” He crouched on his haunches and studied a breastplate. He picked it up, put his finger through a narrow hole that showed only the smallest scorch ring around the entry. “Look at this. What kind of blaster makes that neat of an entry wound?”

  “That is not a blaster hole,” Jaden said. “It’s from a lightsaber.”

  * * *

  Marr’s appearance on the swoop drew some of the Massassi’s fire. Blaster shots tore smoking holes in the speeder but Marr drove straight at them, blazing past Relin, the swoop’s engine changing pitch and sputtering from the blaster damage.

  Amazement did not paralyze Relin. He augmented his speed with the Force and charged out from cover. The nearest pair of Massassi, aiming at Marr’s back as he passed them by, never saw the Jedi coming. Relin decapitated both of them with a spinning crosscut before they turned around.

  The swoop’s engine screamed and Relin turned in time to see Marr roll off its side a moment before it slammed into the loader droid and exploded. Fire, smoke, and a hail of metal parts showered the corridor. The blast wave blew Relin against the wall. Flames engulfed the speeder, droid, and the two Massassi who had sheltered behind it. They staggered down the hall, screaming and burning, making it only three strides before their legs gave out and they fell facedown to the deck.

  One of the loader droid’s arms protruded from the flaming amalgam of plastic and metal, waving in slow motion as if in farewell. The stink of burned flesh, blaster discharge, and melted plastic filled the hall.

  The unexpectedness of the explosion froze the action for a moment. Even the Massassi’s blasters went temporarily silent. Marr lay in the center of the hall, a dazed look on his face.

  The moment passed; violence re-erupted.

  The Massassi near Marr recovered first and trained their blasters on him. But before they could fire, Relin drew on the power he had gained from the Lignan to target a Force blast—a telekinetic burst of concussive force—on the two of them.

  His raised hand and a violent impulse drove a focused blast into their throats and visibly crushed both of their tracheas. They fell to the floor, clutching at their ruined windpipes. One discharged his blaster into the cei
ling as he went down.

  “Cover, Marr!” Relin shouted, in a hard, sharp voice that did not sound like his own.

  He realized only then that he was smiling. He was outside himself, someone else.

  Marr, his face blackened, bleeding from the nose, heeded Relin’s words and scooted against the wall, firing at anything that moved. He hit one Massassi down the hall in the face, another in the leg, then went fully prone in a nearby doorway while blasterfire soaked the air around him.

  Relin stepped into the center of the hallway, near the ruins of the swoop and loader droid, his lightsaber blazing, his spirit on fire from the Lignan, his rage the fuel of the conflagration. He laughed aloud, embracing the full power running through his body, drawing on the sea of energy available to him.

  The Massassi focused their fire on him, but he deflected it almost casually. Walking down the hall, repelling blaster shots as he went, he moved methodically through the ranks of the security team, crushing throats and shattering chests as he went. The last surviving Massassi threw down his blaster, pulled his lanvarok from the scabbard on his back, snarled, and charged. Relin took mental hold of the Massassi’s throat and drove him to his knees, gasping, two paces away.

  Relin stared into his yellow eyes, took in the bared fangs dripping saliva, the piercings of steel and bone that disfigured the Massassi’s face, the map of veins in his straining arms and neck. He drove his lightsaber into the Massassi’s chest and the body fell facedown at his feet.

  Around Relin, Harbinger’s alarm wailed, the loader droid offered distorted, slurred beeps, and the few stubborn Massassi gasped away the moments that remained to them. In the privacy of his mind, Relin heard Drev’s laughter and the irresistible call of his own rage.

  The weight of what he had done and how he had done it, what he had become, settled on him. He stood up straight and bore it. He deactivated his lightsaber and Marr’s hand closed over his shoulder.

  “We should go,” the Cerean said. “Now. More will be coming. You lead.”

  Marr’s touch grounded him. His legs went weak and he sagged, but thought of Drev and did not fall. Turning to face Marr, he saw the blood leaking from the Cerean’s nose. Marr seemed not to notice it. A contusion was purpling on his right cheek.