by James Luceno
Jaden activated his lightsaber and drove the point into and through the clone’s abdomen.
The clone’s roar turned to a groan, but his momentum carried him forward along Jaden’s blade, and as death turned his eyes glassy, he completed his overhand stroke.
The sparking red blade cleaved the bodies beside Jaden and fell from the clone’s hand. It lay there, a red line spitting sparks. It had no auto-off, and its energy burned into the corpses and sank part way into the muck. Jaden stared at its red swirl a long time, the dead eyes of the clone fixed on his face all the while.
Finally Jaden thumbed off his lightsaber and the clone’s body fell free. He pushed the corpse to the side. Grunting with pain, he bent and picked up the clone’s lightsaber, held it beside his own purple blade as best he could with his damaged hand.
Purple and red lines—two lines, two choices.
He deactivated both weapons, slowly stood. Exhaustion made his body shake. Pain turned his vision blurry. He limped to the edge of the cloning cylinder, of Mother.
Desiccated skulls and empty eye sockets bore witness to his passage. Open mouths screamed at him to cast himself in, to join them. The stink made him wince. At least he thought it was the stink.
With effort, grunting with pain, he slowly climbed out of the pit.
When he reached the top, he turned and stared down at the chaotic mass of bodies, all of them twisted together, contorted, as if frozen in a struggle to move over and past one another, or perhaps just pressed into one common mass where struggle no longer mattered. He thought all of it must be a metaphor for something, but his pain- and fatigue-addled mind could not decide for what.
He started to cast the clone’s lightsaber back into the mass of flesh at the bottom of the pit, put it to rest beside his own, but decided against it. Instead, he latched it to his belt, turned, and found himself staring into the eyes of an Anzat. Surprise almost caused him to step back and fall again into the pit.
* * *
In the silence of the cargo bay, drenched in the power of the Lignan, Relin dwelled on his failures. He had failed Saes, failed Drev, failed the Order. He’d even failed Marr, awakening him to the Force so that his first experience with it was the touch of the Lignan.
Anger turned to rage turned to hate. He welcomed it. The proximity to the Lignan intensified the feelings.
His world zeroed down to three things only—himself, his hate, and the object of his hate, Saes. His life had been nothing more than a series of failures. He intended to end it by rectifying the worst of them—Saes.
The hum of the cargo bay lift penetrated the haze of his emotional state. He stood, lightsaber in hand, Lignan in his being, and waited. He heard the lift doors open, heard the sound of boots on the cargo bay floor, and felt Saes’s presence through the Force, the black hole into which Relin had poured his early life. The stacked cargo crates blocked Saes from view, but Relin knew he was there.
Saes’s voice carried from somewhere behind the containers. “Your anger pleases me. Your handiwork in the lift would earn admiration even from the most savage of my Massassi. Well done, Master.”
The last word struck Relin like a punch in the stomach, and he knew Saes intended it to do exactly that. “I am not your Master.”
“No, but you taught me everything I know. Perhaps not the way you intended, but it is to you that I owe my freedom from the slavery of the light side.”
Through the Force, Relin tried to pinpoint Saes’s location. Augmenting a jump with the power of the Force, he leapt atop one of the storage containers. The vantage gave him a better view of the cargo bay. Above the maze of storage containers, he saw the closed lift doors. But no Saes.
“Show yourself,” he said. “Let us finish this.”
The overhead lights flickered, dimmed, casting the bay in shadow.
Saes’s voice carried from behind him. “Do you know what has happened, Relin? Do you know where we are? When we are?”
Relin turned toward the sound of the voice, his body coiled. “I know. It does not matter. Nothing matters now.”
“Because your Padawan is dead?”
Rage clenched Relin’s jaw so tightly his teeth ached.
Saes chuckled. “Your anger runs deep, not just about your Padawan, but about … me.”
Relin swallowed the fist that formed in his throat. Words rushed up from deep inside, words he’d never said even to himself—Your betrayal broke my heart—but he held them behind the wall of his gritted teeth. He saw now that his descent had begun with the doubt that had rooted in him after Saes had turned to the dark side. His slide had simply been slow but, ultimately, inexorable.
“Come out,” he said. “It is time we finished things.”
Saes’s voice came from Relin’s left. “It is not too late. Join me. This is a new time, a new place, ripe for a new beginning.”
Relin was already shaking his head.
But Saes continued: “Have you considered that it was never the purpose of the Force that you save me, but that I save you instead? Join me, Relin.”
The idea pulled at Relin. He felt rudderless, lost. He could join with Saes—
“If you do not, your Padawan will have died in vain.”
And with those words, Saes overstepped. Relin’s rage bubbled over into action. He took telekinetic hold of the storage containers near the sound of Saes’s voice and slammed two of them together. Metal twisted, crashed; the doors of the containers broke open from the impact and more Lignan ore spilled out onto the deck.
He slid another container into them, then another. He realized he was shouting, an incoherent roar of rage with its provenance in a life he now deemed wasted. He stopped, his breath coming hard.
“Come out!”
Saes leapt atop a storage container opposite the one on which Relin stood. A sea of Lignan covered the deck between them, dividing them. Shadows played over the ridges on Saes’s bone mask. His lightsaber hung from his belt.
“You stink of rage,” Saes said. “Where is the calm of the Force of which you so often spoke? The placidity of combat? Or perhaps that was all a lie, as so much you said and believed was?”
Relin let his anger consume his spirit, fill him entirely, and with it he drew on the Force, adding to his strength, his speed.
“Addictive, is it not?” Saes said. “The Lignan, I mean.”
With that, Saes raised his hand and blue Force lightning exploded from his fist. Relin did not try to avoid it. Instead, drawing on the Lignan and fueled with hate, he interposed his lightsaber, drew the lightning to it like iron to a magnet, then spun the blade once over his head and flung the dark side energy back at Saes. More Lignan flared on the floor below as Saes drew on it and absorbed his own Force lightning to no visible effect.
Standing in the shadows of the cargo bay, they regarded each other across the deck of Lignan.
“How should we proceed then?” Saes said.
Relin answered by deactivating his lightsaber.
He was no Jedi, not anymore, and would not fight with a Jedi weapon. Besides, only one form of combat could sate his rage. He tossed his lightsaber down into the pile of Lignan ore below him.
Saes took his point, tilted his head in acknowledgment. He detached his curved lightsaber from his belt and tossed it after Relin’s. He flexed his clawed fingers, inhaled deeply.
“So be it, then.”
Relin shouted and used a Force-enhanced leap to launch himself into the air toward Saes. Answering with a growl, Saes leapt into the air to meet him. They met midway, colliding over the Lignan, both of them filled with the dark side, stronger, faster.
Relin wrapped one arm around Saes, slammed his brow into Saes’s face with the other. The bottom half of the bone mask shattered, raining shards down on the Lignan. Saes’s lower tooth tore a ragged hole in Relin’s forearm before it dislodged and added itself to the mask fragments raining onto the deck.
Saes slashed his claws across Relin’s face. Relin used the Forc
e to resist the blow, but it still dug jagged furrows into his forehead and tore into an eye, though he barely felt the pain.
They fell together, twisting, punching, slashing at a speed and with a force that looked blurry even to Relin. They hit the ground in a tangle of punches and kicks. Hate fueled their blows. Blood sprayed, bones cracked, the Lignan flared all around them as each drew on it in turn.
“I hate you for what you did,” Saes spat between his fangs.
“I hate me for what I am,” Relin said. He rolled away from Saes and from his knees fired a telekinetic blast that drove Saes through the Lignan ore and into a storage container. “But I hate you more.”
He took mental hold of an entire storage container—Lignan ore fell from its open door like droplets of blood—lifted it from the deck, and dropped it on Saes.
Saes caught it in his own mental grasp before it hit. Grunting, Lignan ore flaring to life around him, he threw it back at Relin.
Relin dived aside and the container slammed into another. For the first time, Relin felt the waves of controlled rage radiating from Saes, an anger to match his own. Odd that Relin had never felt it before, in all the time they had spent together as Master and Padawan.
Saes stood and stalked through the Lignan scattered across the floor, the ore flashing as he passed it, consumed by his hate.
“You think rage days old can match mine, nurtured over decades? You think power born of infantile anger can equal mine? I have whet the blade of my hate for years, for this moment!”
He lifted a hand and a concussive wave struck Relin like a sledgehammer, drove him through the Lignan, and slammed him against the storage container. Ribs cracked and his lungs evacuated in a wheeze of pain. Saes continued to close the distance, his eyes dark holes behind the mask, his mouth twisted into a symbol of hate. He held up two fingers and Relin felt Saes’s mental grasp close on his throat and begin to squeeze, pinching off his wheezes. Relin answered with a Force choke of his own, but it only slowed Saes for a moment before he resisted it with his own power.
Relin’s vision grew blurry. Spots appeared before his eyes. He could not even gasp for breath.
Saes stopped before him, loomed over him, his eyes burning.
Feeding tendrils hung from the Anzat’s cheeks, their ends a vicious nail of keratin. For a moment, it seemed as if the Anzat’s head floated free in space, detached from any body, but Jaden realized that the creature wore a mimetic suit and had thrown back the mask and hood. The rest of his body simply blended in with the background, even up close.
Wrung out from his battle with the clone, Jaden raised his mental defenses too slowly and the Anzat projected his will into Jaden’s mind.
Be still.
The words bounced around in Jaden’s mind, found purchase in the ancient reptilian structures in the deepest part of his brain. His higher functions screamed for him to act, to defend himself, but the Anzat’s mental projection lodged like a leech on Jaden’s brain stem, froze his voluntary muscles and chained his will. He felt as if he might be dreaming, his mind in the grip of a nightmare, his body too paralyzed to react.
The Anzat’s eyes flashed, the nostrils on his slightly upturned nose flared. He leaned in close, his face only a centimeter from Jaden’s, but not quite touching, as if denying himself for a moment some treat he’d longed for. The Anzat’s eyes impaled Jaden. He fought against the Anzat’s hold on his mind, trying to dislodge the mind leech, but his mind, depleted from the battle with the clone, could not get free.
The Anzat sensed his failed struggle and smiled.
“I am Kell Douro,” the Anzat said, his voice thick with an accent that Jaden could not place. “You are my salvation, Jaden Korr.”
The Anzat took Jaden by the shoulders and the cables of the alien’s appendages burrowed into Jaden’s nostrils, the sharp point of the tip slashing sensitive tissues. Pain exploded in his mind, setting off a spark shower of agony before his eyes, but he could not move.
Kell inhaled deeply as he drove his feeders into the blood-slickened tunnels of Jaden’s nostrils. He shuddered each time they pierced a membrane or slashed tissue. The lines of their daen nosi swirled around them, their motion rapid, chaotic, a reflection of Kell’s own excitement. They became so tangled he had trouble distinguishing the silver of his own lines from the red and green that denoted Jaden’s potential futures. His legs weakened at the thought of consuming the Jedi’s soup, of understanding at last, after centuries of seeking, the map of the universe and his purpose in it.
He watched his lines enmesh Jaden’s, strangle them, wipe out whatever future the Jedi might have had. His feeders pierced a membrane and squirmed for the Jedi’s brain, his soup. Jaden’s body shuddered.
Kell stared at the daen nosi, expecting to see Jaden’s green and red end, overcome by the silver net of Kell’s future.
Instead he saw Jaden’s lines endure, saw his own lines knotted off and consumed by the dull gray strands of another. The three sets of lines resolved into a noticeable pattern. Behind the pattern, within the pattern, Kell saw the meaning of life, his purpose.
A blaster barrel pressed up against his temple. He felt it only distantly, thickly.
“Thank you,” he said.
At first Jaden did not think he was seeing clearly, thought, perhaps, that his mind had retreated into dreams while he died. He saw Khedryn materialize beside the Anzat. Blood dripped from Khedryn’s shattered nose, and his eyes were so swollen Jaden was surprised he could see at all. He held the BlasTech E-11 in his hands, the blaster they had seen in the armory off the barracks. He had its barrel pressed against the Anzat’s head.
The Anzat’s feeders started to retract from Jaden’s nose.
“Thank you?” Khedryn said, stress raising his voice an octave higher than usual. “Frag you.”
He squeezed the trigger and turned the Anzat’s head into a fine red mist. The Anzat’s body fell to the floor, blood pouring from the neck stump. The feeder appendages, severed from the nearly vaporized head, still dangled from Jaden’s nose. Jaden sagged, wobbled. Khedryn steadied him.
“Are you all right? Jaden?”
Khedryn’s voice sounded from far away. But it was drawing closer and Jaden was returning to himself.
“I am all right,” he said to Khedryn. “Thank you.”
Khedryn smiled. “That is a thank-you I’ll accept.”
Wincing, Jaden jerked the feeders out of his nose and dropped them on the Anzat’s body. Nausea seized him and he vomited onto the floor. Khedryn put a hand on his shoulder and nodded at the Anzat’s corpse.
“That thing got to me before it got you. What is it?”
Jaden wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and straightened on shaky legs.
“An Anzat. I think he followed us from Fhost, but I’m not sure.”
“You sure you’re all right?”
Jaden took in the ruin of Khedryn’s face.
“I should be asking that of you.”
Khedryn took Jaden’s arm and helped support him. “I’ve been beaten worse than this, Jedi.” He looked down into Mother, at the slain clone and the grizzly contents of her gullet.
“What happened here? Are those the doctors and stormies? Stang.”
“Yes,” Jaden said, and deliberately did not look into Mother. “I’ll explain the rest on the way out. We must hurry. There are more surviving clones, Khedryn. They want a ship and we cannot allow that. We need to get back to Flotsam. Now.”
Khedryn cleared his throat, spit blood and phlegm onto the floor. “If they take my ship anywhere, I will hunt them across the ’verse.”
“Yes,” Jaden said, and activated his purple-bladed saber. He could barely hold it in his wounded hand. “We will.”
“Where did you get that lightsaber?” Khedryn asked.
“Long story.”
Together they hurried back through the facility, both holding weapons built decades earlier—Khedryn a stormtrooper-issued blaster, Jaden a lightsaber he�
�d built as a boy. They retraced their steps past one scene of slaughter to another. The facility seemed less ominous to Jaden now, but it still felt haunted by ghosts.
Jaden told Khedryn what he’d learned from the clone: that other clones had survived on the moon for decades, that they wanted desperately to get off, that they were mad and dangerous.
“Did they have any children?”
Khedryn’s question slowed Jaden’s steps. He had not considered that. “I … don’t know.”
By the time they neared the West Entry, Jaden had recovered some of his strength. He did not have the time or capacity to interpret all he’d learned—about the facility and himself—but he would, later.
“Did you get the answer you wanted?” Khedryn asked as he pulled up his helmet and sealed the neck ring.
“I don’t know,” Jaden admitted. He deactivated his lightsaber and started to pull up his helmet, realized that his suit was so damaged from combat with the clone that sealing it was pointless.
Seeing that, Khedryn said, “You will be cold.”
“I’ll abide,” Jaden said.
* * *
Relin was going to die, was going to add another failure to the long line of failures that composed his life as a Jedi. The rage went out of him as if drained through a hole in his heel. Despair replaced it, black and empty.
Saes held out a hand, and his lightsaber flew from the deck to his palm. He ignited it. In its hum, Relin heard his death pronounced.
“You understand now, at the end,” Saes said. He removed the remains of his mask and regarded Relin with yellow eyes that looked almost sympathetic. “That pleases me.”
Relin dwelled in the bottomless void of his despondence. And in the void, in its endlessness, he saw his purpose fulfilled.
He drew on the Lignan, fed its power into the hole at his core. The emptiness in him was insatiable, drinking the power as fast as he could pull it in, yet never getting filled.
His body and mind swelled with the influx. The ore dotting the deck flared in answer to his desires. Sneering, Saes drew on the Lignan himself.
Relin gripped Saes’s throat in his mental grasp. Saes tried to swat away the Force choke with his own power. His eyes widened when he realized he could not. He gasped, staggered. Relin sat up, thought of Drev, and squeezed.