by James Luceno
“Thank you,” Relin said to Marr. “My injuries have … slowed me.”
Marr gestured at the corpses. “What kind of creatures are these?”
“Massassi,” Relin answered absently. “Warriors bred by Sith alchemy from original Sith stock.”
Marr nodded. “Something similar occurred with clones in a recent war in this time.” He knelt over one of the dead Massassi and took its blaster, testing its heft in his hand. Seemingly satisfied, he slid it into his thigh holster, keeping his own blaster drawn.
“I do not have much of a charge left in mine,” he explained.
Overhead, the alarm continued its wail.
Marr tried to push Relin along. “You lead.”
Relin stood his ground, shook his head. “No, Marr. Go back.”
“I know what you will say, but I can help you.” He tried again to nudge Relin forward. “There is little time. You are sick, Relin. You cannot make it alone.”
Relin was sick, but not only in the way Marr meant. And he had to do it alone.
“I have lost two Padawans already, Marr. One to darkness and another to fire. I will not be responsible for anyone else.”
Marr stood up straight. “It is my choice to make.”
Relin’s temper flared and he poked a finger into the Cerean’s chest. “It is not. You are to return to Junker and get off this ship. Now.”
Marr looked as if Relin had struck him. His expression fell. “But … what you taught me in the ship, about the Force. I did not … I felt the power of the Lignan. I know this ship needs to be destroyed.”
Relin’s anger leaked over the brim of his control. “You felt nothing, Cerean! Nothing!” He felt a burning in his fingertips, looked down to see blue Force lightning leaking from them, snaking around the hilt of his deactivated lightsaber. He felt himself color with shame. He did not look up when he spoke, though he managed a gentler tone.
“Go, Marr. Please.”
“But I felt the Force …”
“Then let your awakening be my legacy. But I can teach you nothing more. You must go.”
He felt Marr’s eyes on him, studying him, as if Relin were a computation Marr needed to solve. “You do not intend to escape.”
Relin did not deny it. “I am no longer a Jedi, Marr. I am just … a murderer. And there’s yet more murder that I must do.”
Marr kept his face expressionless. “You do not have to do this in this way.”
“Good-bye, Marr. Seal up Junker and go. Things will end as they must.”
Marr hesitated, but finally extended his hand. Relin tucked his lightsaber hilt under his left arm and clasped Marr’s hand.
“May the—” Marr stopped himself, started again. “Good luck, Relin.”
Relin winced over the verbal detour and what it meant. “And you, Marr. Do me a service. Tell Jaden that he was right. And tell him that he was also wrong. There is nothing certain. There’s only the search for it. Things only turn dangerous when you think the search is over. He will know what I mean.”
“I will tell him,” Marr said.
Relin allowed himself that maybe those words, too, could be his legacy.
Without another word, he turned from Marr and headed down a side corridor. The moment he had his back to Marr, the moment that shame no longer reined in rage, he embraced fully what he had become.
Kell trailed the Starhawk by fifty kilometers, well out of visual range given the snowstorm. And the Starhawk’s scanners would never pierce Predator’s sensor baffles. Jaden’s ship showed up clearly on Predator’s scanners, though, and Kell traced its flight as it closed on the source of the Imperial beacon. He knew when they reached it, for the Starhawk slowed, circled. Kell kept Predator as a distance, waiting for Jaden to set down.
He did not have to wait long.
He delayed a quarter hour before piloting Predator in the direction of Jaden’s ship, but stayed high enough to make visual detection difficult.
Below, he saw a building complex, its walls gripped in ice, the spike of the communications tower blinking red through the storm. He snapped photos with his ship’s nose cam, intending to send them to Wyyrlok via subspace when he got back into outer space.
Despite the beacon’s warning, he expected little danger from anything or anyone other than Jaden. He supposed there could be some leftover and still-functioning automated security apparatus, but he could not imagine anything organic surviving for long on the moon.
He set Predator down a kilometer away from the Starhawk and hurried to the hold. The stasis chambers stood empty—he had fed on all his stored meat—but they piqued his hunger for Jaden. His feeders twisted in his cheek sacs.
He donned his mimetic suit and activated it, holstered his blaster, sheathed his vibroblades. He threw a thick enviro-suit over the whole and climbed into his covered speeder.
Wind buffeted the cargo bay the moment he opened the door. The speeder rocked on its repulsorlifts. Snow and ice blew in, dusting the windscreen. Kell activated Predator’s security system as he drove the speeder out of the bay.
Gliding over the frozen landscape, he downloaded the Starhawk’s location from Predator’s computer and accelerated to full speed, chasing Fate. He stopped the speeder fifty meters from Jaden’s landing site, threw up the hood of his weathercloak, and climbed out.
The wind and cold rifled his cloak, wormed under his insulation, and stabbed at his skin. The faint aroma of sulfur hung in the freezing air, probably due to volcanism.
With an effort of will, he elevated his core body temperature until he felt comfortable. He trudged to the top of a snow dune—the wind tried to pull him from his perch—and glassed the Starhawk’s landing site with a pair of macrobinoculars.
The ship sat on its skids atop a clear field of packed ice, apparently sealed tight. He increased the magnification of the binoculars and confirmed that security screens covered the viewports.
Most likely Jaden had already exited the ship.
Examining the area around the ship, he thought he might have seen indentations in the snow that could have been footprints leading toward the facility, but he’d have to get closer. He glassed the facility itself.
Snow covered all but the communications tower and the rectangular central facility. He noted the single-story steel-and-duracrete construction, the lack of windows, the sealed hatches for doors. The whole place sweated Imperial functionalism, with nothing wasted on aesthetics.
Probably a research facility of some kind, Kell supposed. He imagined a lower level or two belowground. An experiment gone awry would explain the beacon’s message.
Walking sideways down the dune, he returned to the speeder and used its onboard scanners to check the complex for radiation. His body could endure radiation exposure that would kill most other sentients, but he saw no reason in taking chances.
Detecting nothing dangerous, he drove the speeder up to the Starhawk. He stripped off his enviro-suit, exposing the mimetic suit, and pulled up its hood and mask. As he disembarked the speeder, he upped his core temperature still more. The mimetic suit turned him white, even mimed a tumble of blowing snow.
Drawing his blaster, he walked the area around the ship until he found the footprints. They were so deep that the wind and snow had not yet effaced them. Two pairs of boots dug a chain of little pits in the snow in the direction of a large entry hatch in the main complex.
Jaden was not alone. He was accompanied by either Khedryn Faal or Marr Idi-Shael. Their soup Kell did not crave, not anymore. His appetite was limited to Jaden Korr.
He hurried back to the speeder, parked it out of sight of the Starhawk, and headed for the hatch.
His mimetic suit turned him into just more blowing snow.
He was a ghost.
When Jaden and Khedryn found the central computer room, it had been ransacked. All of the comp stations appeared to be destroyed, some obviously slashed by lightsabers, others simply smashed with something heavy. Ruined display screens, servers, a
nd CPUs dotted the floor. Pieces of shattered data crystals crunched underfoot like caltrops.
“Someone did not like computers,” Khedryn said.
Jaden had hoped to find an answer in the core computing room. Instead he’d found the same ruin that characterized the rest of the complex. He felt pressure building in his chest, at the base of his skull.
For the first time, he began to worry that the complex had nothing to show him.
But how could that be?
He went from table to table, sorting through the debris.
“Anything usable, Khedryn. There has to be something here. Look! Look!”
Khedryn joined him, the two of them sifting the strata of destruction like archaeologists.
Khedryn pulled a water-stained hard-copy schematic from the debris, holding it gently by one corner. “Looks like the layout of this facility.” He studied it for a moment, turned it over, slowly unfolding it.
“Careful,” Jaden said.
Khedryn got it unfolded in one piece and studied it. “It mentions a lower level in the key but does not show it.”
“Good find. Keep looking.”
Jaden needed something more solid, something that would show him where the Force wanted him to go. He could not consult his feelings. They were too clouded with doubt. He wanted facts. He wanted—needed—to understand the facility’s purpose, the reason for all the mystery.
Reaching under a desk against the wall, he found some stray data crystals, frayed power cords, and a single computer that was not obviously damaged. The batteries would be long dead.
“I need a power cord,” he said over his shoulder.
“Here,” Khedryn said, grabbing one from the floor near his feet and tossing it to Jaden.
Jaden held his breath as he plugged one end into the computer, the other into an outlet, and turned on the power.
He blew out a relieved breath when it hummed to life. He thought Khedryn must surely have heard his heartbeat.
“There are data crystals under that desk. Grab them. Any that are intact.”
Khedryn did. There were dozens.
They tried one after another, quickly finding all of them encrypted or unusable. Jaden’s elation faded. The facility seemed intent on keeping its secrets.
“Second to last,” Khedryn said. “Holocrystal.”
He tossed it to Jaden. Jaden snatched it out of the air and shot him a glare for being so careless. Khedryn responded by making bug eyes.
Jaden inserted the crystal into the functioning computer and tried to extract usable data. As he had with all the others, he moved through a series of files and found most of them corrupted. He executed two or three and the computer’s holoplayer projected only a scrambled image and indecipherable audio.
Khedryn shook his head and walked away in frustration.
Toward the end of the file string, Jaden hit on a log of files that appeared less damaged than the others.
“Here,” he said to Khedryn, and ran the files.
“What do you have?”
“Let’s see.”
The computer holoprojector lit up, and a shaky hologram materialized before them. Dr. Black—they could read the name on his lab coat—a paunchy, graying human with a receding hairline and eyes set too close together, spoke without much inflection.
“… of us will keep a log. This is mine. Experiment log. Day one. Dr. Gray was finally able to recombine the sample DNA into a usable form. I told him that he’d earned a drink from the whiskey stores. Dr. Green and Red agree on the growth medium. Subjects A through I are born.”
He gave a tiny smile, nodded slightly as if satisfied, and the log entry faded out.
“DNA?” Khedryn said. “Clones or a bioweapon, then.”
“Seems likely,” Jaden said, though he dared not follow the thread of his thoughts to its conclusion. Instead he continued the holo-log. Long portions of it were ruined. They saw still moments captured in time as if frozen by the ice of the moon: Dr. Black’s face motionless in an expression of triumph or defeat, his pronouncement of a single word or phrase that meant little absent context.
“Jedi and Sith,” Dr. Black said, the words floating alone in the cold space of the ruined data crystal, nothing before or after them to give them meaning.
Jaden stopped the holo, reset the recording to an earlier point, at the same time rewinding in his head the voices and imagery from his vision.
“Jedi and Sith,” said Dr. Black.
Jaden, said Mara Jade Skywalker.
Jaden played it again.
“Jedi and Sith,” said Dr. Black. “Jedi and Sith.”
Jaden, said Master Solusar.
“There is no more in that bit, Jaden,” Khedryn said. “Keep going.”
Jaden, said Lassin.
“Jaden,” Khedryn said, louder, and put a hand over Jaden’s. “Speed it forward.”
Jaden came back to himself and nodded, his mind spinning, then continued the holo. He felt knots drawing close, puzzle pieces falling into place. Another single word chilled his blood.
“… Palpatine,” Dr. Black said.
“I thought this was a Thrawn-era facility,” Khedryn said.
“It was,” Jaden answered, but said no more.
“Keep going,” Khedryn said, warming to the mystery.
Jaden did, and they hit on a longer entry.
“There,” Khedryn said.
Jaden replayed it.
“… thirty-three. The experiment has been an unqualified success. We retarded the maturation process as much as possible to ensure an appropriate rate of growth, but the subjects still grew to maturity much more rapidly than our models predicted. Memory imprinting will begin soon, though the subjects appear to have been born with extant knowledge of their Force sensitivity. All have exhibited mastery of basic and moderately advanced Force techniques. Testing reveals an extraordinarily high midi-chlorian count in all subjects. Grand Admiral Thrawn has been apprised of the results.”
The entry ended, and neither Khedryn nor Jaden said anything.
Ignoring the feel of Khedryn’s eyes on him, Jaden sped forward through the log, looking for something else coherent, rushing toward whatever catastrophe befell the facility.
A broken entry sometime later showed a haggard-looking Dr. Black. His entire body drooped, as if borne down by a great weight. A few unidentifiable stains marred his lab coat.
“He looks like he has lost ten kilos,” Khedryn said.
Jaden played the hologram. Dr. Black spoke to them from out of the past.
“Subject H was killed by the other Subjects in an incident of collective … rage. We are unsure what sparked the incident.”
The holo faded. Jaden sped it forward but encountered nothing for some time. Then Black appeared again, the circles under his eyes dark enough to have been drawn in ink. He licked his lips nervously as he spoke.
“… appear to have an unusual connection to one another, empathetic certainly. Possibly telepathic. This was unexpected. Dr. Gray believes that …”
The image faded again and in the next available entry, Dr. Black’s voice audibly quavered. “We discovered today that Subject A had smuggled enough spare parts into his living quarters to build a rudimentary lightsaber. A subsequent search of the other Subjects’ living quarters revealed that all of them had partially constructed lightsabers at one or another stage of development. Security has been …”
The entry turned black. So did Jaden’s thoughts.
“Lightsabers?” Khedryn asked, his voice low. “Were they cloning … Jedi?”
For a moment, Jaden’s mouth refused to form words. In his head he saw Lassin, Kam, Mara, all of them with Force signatures more akin to Sith than Jedi. How could Thrawn have gotten their DNA? Mara would have been easy, but Kam? Lassin? The others?
“I do not know for certain,” he said, while the words from Dr. Black’s original entry stuck in his brain as if tacked there by a nail: recombine the sample DNA.
Th
e DNA of whom? Or what?
Jedi and Sith.
Palpatine.
Jaden’s mouth was as dry as a Tatooine desert. He continued through the holo-log, a pit the size of a fist opening in his stomach. He stopped when a human woman in a lab coat appeared before them. She wore her dark hair short and looked younger than Dr. Black. Her left hand twitched as she spoke. Jaden read the name on her coat—DR. GRAY. He wondered what had happened to Dr. Black, then supposed he did not want to know.
“… their hostility toward their confinement is growing, as is their power. Even the stormtroopers seem frightened by them …”
A final entry followed. Again, Dr. Gray spoke.
“… lost control. The lower level is sealed and I have requested of the Grand Admiral that the experiment be terminated along with the Subjects by way of a trihexalon gas protocol. All of the surviving staff members agree with this recommendation.”
The holo-log stopped, though the frozen image of Dr. Gray hung in the air before them like a ghost. Jaden and Khedryn sat in silence, each alone with the jumble of his thoughts. Jaden spoke first.
“There is a lower level. There must be a lift.”
“They had hex here,” Khedryn said, his brow wrinkled with concern. “If they used it, even the residuum could be harmful. I saw a holovid that showed what that stuff can do. We are in deep here, Jaden.”
Jaden barely heard him. “We need to find the lift, go down, see if anyone is there.” He pictured the shape of the facility. They had covered most of it already. The lift had to be nearby.
Khedryn stepped through the image of Dr. Gray to stand before Jaden. “Did you hear me?”
“Did you hear the holo-log? They had prisoners here.”
“Subjects,” Khedryn said. “Clones. Lab rats.”
“They were confined against their will.”
“From the sound of it, that was the right thing to do. They thought them dangerous enough to gas them with hex, Jaden.”
Jaden fixed Khedryn with a thousand-kilometer stare. “I need to go down.”